Origin Story Rewrite
by Worldmaker
Summary: Rewriting "Origin Story." Halloween ends, and Xander finds himself in a place he never thought was real, under circumstances he never saw coming.
1. Orbital Decay

**Orbital Decay**

_"I know the truth. I remember all that happened, and I'm not going to forget. Worlds lived, worlds died. Nothing will ever be the same... I like to remember the past because those were better times than now. I mean, I'd rather live in the past than today, wouldn't you? I mean, nothing's ever certain anymore. Nothing's ever predictable like it used to be. These days... y-you just never know who's going to die... and who's going to live."_ -– **The Psycho-Pirate**, _"Crisis on Infinite Earths"_ #12

**XxxxxxX**

Had there been enough atmosphere to carry the sound, the noise of the event would have been deafening; as it was, the entire cataclysmic instance came and went in complete silence. A sudden burst of heat and light and radiation accompanied the tearing open of a hole in the very fabric of reality. The hole existed for only a moment, if such things can be said to exist at all, but that was enough for it to spit forth a flesh-and-blood figure of human shape and proportion, clad only in the skin it had been born in. The figure had been propelled as if it was a bullet fired from a gun.

Xander Harris blinked, twice, utterly surprised at his whereabouts. A moment ago he had been on the streets of Sunnydale, escorting a group of children while they gathered candy on Halloween. He had been wearing the horribly embarassing costume... the girl's costume with the blonde wig and the fake gag breasts that Cordelia Chase had forced him into after he lost the bet. He remembered talking to Buffy and Willow at one point, then the three of them splitting up. Then there was a muted grayness from which he could discern events with which he had no mental connection at all. And then suddenly he was here, above the earth, falling uncontrollably.

As he took a very short second to wonder how he'd ended up in this position, Xander had flashes of memory. The flashes involved his protecting a screaming woman, and a ghost, and a girl in a cat costume from being attacked by monsters. He had a vague memory of a tall blonde man's face changing into something horrible in front of his eyes... but these flashes came and went without him being able to concentrate on them. The truth was, Xander was having trouble concentrating on anything other than the ground, which was climbing up to punch him like a very slow-moving fist.

It took him a moment to realize where he was, and for the terrible knowledge that low orbit above the Earth was, naturally, an untenable position for a naked human being to find itself in. His first thought had been that he was floating... and then he realized that not only was he moving across the landscape, but that the landscape below him was actually getting closer every second. Naturally, he immediately opened his mouth and began screaming like a little girl.

Not that there was enough air around him to carry the sound yet. He was beginning to feel the slips and scraps of atmosphere around him, but by no means was it enough to carry sound. Or to allow him to breathe at all. With a concentration that could only be gained through being in such overwhelming physical danger, he recognized that he really should be choking to death at any minute; he should be freezing to death, or suffering the effects of explosive decompression. None of that was happening, which confused him even more. The knowledge that he was still alive when he should be swiftly dying did nothing to calm him down, and he screamed some more.

He had two odd thoughts as he fell and screamed. While his conscious mind was busy being terrified by his onrushing doom, his subconscious mind had been analyzing everything he'd seen and was thrusting two startling conclusions into his head. The first was a recognition that he was high enough to see the curvature of the Earth, which meant no doubt that he was doomed to die in fiery re-entry into the atmosphere. The second was the same thought every astronaut had ever had, viewing the Earth from this distance: the world was an amazingly beautiful and singular place.

After a few minutes he began to hear a high-pitched keening, and it surprised him to realize what it was: it was his own voice. The air around him had thickened to the point that he could begin to hear himself screaming, and he did sound just like a little girl.

The air around him was beginning to glow from the friction of his passage through it. A few second later and he was surrounded by streamers of heated gas; the air was literally catching fire from the heat generated by his fall. The same part of his brain that recognized that he wasn't strangling to death on the vacuum of space noticed that he wasn't burning. Atmospheric friction could melt and burn meteors composed of solid iron until such rocks were nothing more than ash and cinder, but he wasn't burning. He could feel a mild warmth, but not the multiple-thousands of degrees that tumbling through the atmosphere at such speeds as he was traveling should have caused.

As the feeling of warmth increased, the heat began to get uncomfortable, but never really turned painfully hot. The air pressure had increased to the point that the wind thundered in his ears, but he was not deafened. He could still hear himself screaming over the roar of the surrounding wind.

Below him the Earth had turned from a vast expanse of blue gray to a light tan, and then a vast expanse of pale tannish white. At first Xander thought he was falling into snow. Eventually his mind caught up to itself and he realized that flashing by below him was a desert. He had a slight grasp of his trajectory and realized that he was going to smash into the range of low mountains currently sitting just this side of the horizon.

He stopped screaming. The entire experience had become too much. Xander knew that his likely point of hit the ground didn't matter at all; no matter where he landed, he'd be touching down with the force of a bomb. The force of impact would be enough to vaporize him, most likely, and he would probably be dead before he had a chance to realize he'd struck the surface of the earth.

He had time to start praying, and did so. While he'd never been an overly religious person, Xander's experiences with the supernatural had convinced him that God existed, and that there was a Heaven. It was basic logic: such things as demons and Hell could not exist if their counterpart angels and Heaven did not. His mind couldn't conceive of a world that unfair. And so in desperation he prayed. He prayed to God, to Jesus, Mohammed, Vishnu, Thor, Odin, Zeus, Chango. Being a George Carlin fan, he even tossed a quick prayer in the direction of Joe Pesci.

Xander Harris was still praying when he barreled into the side of a mountain at nearly the speed of sound. His impact was harder than any human being had any right to survive, and created a crater nearly seventy feet wide and forty feet deep. He was almost instantly unconscious from the shock of it all.

**XxxxxxX**

The radar screen was obligingly clear. Every once in a while, the radar pick-up would read a scheduled space launch from Cape Canaveral, or from Jiuquan in China, Baikonur in Khazakstan, or Kagoshima in Japan. But mostly from Cape Canaveral. The launches from the southern hemisphere were monitored by a separate facilitity. On other occasions they'd pick up high-altitude testing of experimental aircraft, or a trans-polar passenger plane, or a larger-than-normal meteor. And on very rare occasions they were able to track the atmospheric re-entry of one of the larger pieces of space-trash.

Once they'd actually been able to track the homicidal artificial intelligence known as Ultron as it attempted to escape the Avengers. That was a fun night, with many a bet made between radar operators.

But tonight, nothing was being launched, and that was a good thing. When you were a radar telemetry specialist for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, "boring and empty screens" was the preferred status. "Boring and empty" meant none of the members of the Worldwide Nuclear Club was angry at another member. "Boring and empty" meant that, for tonight at least, there wasn't going to be a nuclear war.

Senior Airman David Keller was tired and hated it. In his opinion, it wasn't fair; no matter how much sleep he got, he still felt exhausted during the overnight shift. His body just wasn't adjusting to not sleeping at night. But he was damned if he would fall asleep on the job before he reached the end of the week. Falling asleep while you were on the line was not the way to make the officers and senior non-coms you worked for happy, and unhappy officers tended to do silly things like dock your pay and take away your weekend liberty.

The weekend was the Holy Grail for him. He had a week of leave coming up, and a plane to catch back to Tampa where he belonged. It wasn't that Keller didn't love his job; running a FARLOOK radar station as part of the "shield of the sky" against incoming missiles was an important and vital job, and it could be a lot of fun as well. And it was both technical enough to be interesting and simple enough to not need a PhD to do it well. But he was a Florida boy, born and bred; Alaska was about as far from Florida as one could get and still be in the United States. And it was all wrapped up in that one word: Alaska. He's make it a new curse word had he the power to do so. As far as Keller was concerned, Alaska sucked serious ass. The weather sucked. The lack of beaches sucked. The fact that all the lakes were freezing cold sucked.

And of course, the ultimate problem with Alaska, in David Keller's opinion, was that you couldn't get decent citrus here. No decent lemons, no decent grapefruit, and especially no decent oranges. All you could get was those shriveled up pieces of crap citrus from California. California! Couldn't you just laugh? His brother had once air-mailed him ten pounds of Florida navel oranges straight from the Hale Groves in Indian River. He'd taken one of his precious soft-ball sized navel oranges to the mess hall specifically to compare them to the piece-of-shit tennis-ball sized California oranges. The mess sergeant had shrugged in a "what can you do" way. And then he'd offered Keller five bucks for one of his navel oranges.

In Keller's opinion, calling Alaska a shithole was an insult to shitholes.

Keller blinked, then blinked again. Then again. Almost casually, he rubbed at his eyes, trying to keep the "crinkly-around-the-edges" feeling from taking them over. Without realizing he was doing it, Keller yawned. He caught it before it went to far and began berating himself for yawning, only to immediately do it a second time in the middle of his self-directed rant.

He brought his hand up to his eyes again and closed them, pressing slightly. While his eyes were closed he yawned a third time, wider than the last two times. It was during this third yawn that a white circle about the size of a grain of rice popped up onto his screen out of nowhere. His computer, which "thought" infinitely faster than he did immedately labeled the new contact 001-000X.

Keller reopened his eyes and spotted the white spot on his screen. He stared at it a moment before realizing what it indicated. Oh shit! How did that get there! The contact's label caught his attention. The computer apparently didn't recognize the contact by its radar-return silhouette, which was odd. He immediately entered the command to run the an analysis program he and his fellow radar technicians referred to as the "dishwasher program." It analyzed the signal over and over and over, cleaning it of chaff and false returns as much as possible in an attempt to get a better radar-return and potentially identifying the object.

The white circle on his screen actually got smaller, but the -000X indicator did not change. The computer still had no idea what this thing was. He started an impact track and, finally managing to conquer his nerves, hit his comm button. "Control, Station Four."

"Go four." The voice of the current duty officer, Lieutenant Loraine Pye, came back to him almost instantly.

"Control, I have a re-entry event at 58.351422 by 134.511579, angels 35 and falling fast." Keller entered a re-confirm command into his terminal, just to make sure what he was telling the duty officer was accurate. "Contact logged at..." the airman glanced at the time readout in the corner of his computer screen. "Make that logged at 0241 hours."

"Contact at 58.351422 by 134.511579 angels 35. Copy. Do you have an identification, Four?" Keller heard the Lieutenant's voice both in his headset and from outside of it, telling him that she was swiftly approaching his station. He ran the contact through the wash for a second time. Again, the best that happened was that the contact rang back with a better positional fix. That gave them its general size, but by no means identified what sort of object it was.

"Negative. No identification." As the lieutenant was now standing next to him, Keller pushed his headset away from his ears, so as to avoid the possible feedback squeal caused by her headset's close proximity. "Ma'am, I've washed it three times and still can't tell you what it is." He tapped a series of commands into his keyboard and a second window opened up on his screen that listed the little information he did know. "Its reading dense, but not as dense as metal or stone. The wash says that it can't be more than two meters long. Irregular return means that we don't have smooth surfaces; I don't think this is a missile at all. And the return is pretty soft, too. See?"

He tapped his monitor screen with a fingernail, and Lieutenant Pye helpfully leaned over his shoulder to look for herself. He was quiet for a moment as his duty officer contemplated the information he was feeding her.

"Okay," she said slowly, still thinking. "So its not a missile, and its softer than metal. What would your best guess be?"

Keller was quiet for a long while. Pye wasn't the type of officer who would bite a guy's head off if he made an educated guess and was wrong. That said, she was the kind of officer who would bite a guy's head off for having all the information and still being wrong.

"If I had to guess, man, I'd think it was a chunk of one of those stealth bombers. They read like this when they have their bomb bay doors open."

The lieutenant nodded. "And you know what that looks like on a radar screen?" she asked with a grin.

"Ask me no questions, ma'am, and I'll tell you no lies." It was an old joke. The people who flew the USA's fleet of stealth aircraft liked to brag about the fact that they were functionally invisible when they were in the air. The truth is, if the radar in question was powerful enough, no amount of stealthing would stop a flight detection. And NORAD had the most powerful radar emitters on the planet, outside of the observatory at Aricebo in Puerto Rico and its 385 meter-wide radar dish. Of course, the men and women who manned the nation's sky defense system didn't ever intentionally rub the fact that their little invisible planes were clearly visible to the radars of NORAD in the pilots' collective faces. Because that would be wrong.

Pye was still grinning. "Okay, let's look into this." She pulled her headset back into its proper position and spoke into the microphone. "Firewatch, this is Control."

A slightly electronic-sounding voice came back to her within moments. "Firewatch. Go Control."

"Sergeant Baker, do we have anything that even looks like a launch detection? We have a contact with no go-alarms." She returned her gaze to Keller's radar screen.

"Control, I have negative on launch detections. We do have a notification of a commercial launch out of Great Mercury Island, but its supposed to be geo-stat and not enter our AOC at all." Baker had naturally been monitoring when Keller called Pye. "Should we go to alert, ma'am?"

"Wait one, Firewatch."

"Roger. On standby."

"Thanks, Firewatch." Lieutenant Pye turned her full attention back to Keller and his contact. "Okay, so nothing but a commercial sattelite launch out of New Zealand. How's this thing's arc. Is it a ballistic?" Ballistic contacts were free-falling rather than guided, and most ballistic contacts were natural objects like meteors.

Keller tapped a few commands. "That's affirmative, ma'am. It is on a free-falling course with no corrections. I'd say it was completely unguided. Radar-return says its juking slightly, probably because of the winds." He shrugged. "Might not be all that aerodynamic if its a natural."

"I don't know." She had a vague, questioning look on her face. "A non-aerodynamic ballistic that reads like a stealth aircraft? You ever see anything like that before?" When Keller shook his head, she muttered, "Neither have I."

She continued to stare over Keller's shoulder for a moment. "Time to impact?"

"Um... hold one." The radar tech entered several commands before finally turning to the duty officer. "Looks like about six, maybe seven minutes."

"Any idea where its going to hit?"

The tech tapped at his computer, bringing up a map. "Projected impact in the Silver Island Mountains in Nevada. That's near the Bonneville Salt Flats, ma'am. Big wide open are without a lot of people except the gear-heads who like to race their cars on the salt. Shouldn't be any casualties and minor environmental damage."

"Okay," she nodded. "Give me an update if anything changes." She turned back toward her own station. "Firewatch, Control. Take us to Alert One." She sighed. "I'll give the CO a call."

Everyone in the room heard it when the PA system announced, "Condition set to Alert One. The count has started." On the digital screen at the front of the room, a graphic of the western coast of the United States and Canada suddenly appeared. The contact was indicated by a small white circle. A white line extending behind it showed where it had been, while a red line projecting ahead of it showed its anticipated course.

**XxxxxxX**

Less than five minutes later, both Captain Tillend, Lieutenant Pye's immediate superior, and Colonel Ball, the commander of the post, stormed into the operations ceenter. Both were frowning, though whether it was from the mysterious nature of the contact or the fact that Pye had called them in at two in the morning was anyone's guess.

Both of the newcomers walked to the control station, staring at the big board. The contact's path was plotted, and was expected to hit somewhere near Bonneville in Nevada within the next couple of minutes. The projected impact site had a blinking yellow circle around it.

After a few moments, the Colonel turned to Pye. "All right, Lieutenant, tell me what you have."

"Yes sir. At 0241, Senior Airman Keller at Station Four recorded a ballistic contact on re-entry. Radar-return says that the object was either very small or was non-reflective. The object was clearly unguided and was experiencing course interference from the wind. The air resistance was not corrected, so it was ruled unguided. Keller also said it was giving a return similar to what we get from the stealth aircraft, which lead us to further believe that whatever it was made of was relatively soft."

"I tasked a couple of SIDELOOKS and the sihouette on this thing was just too irregular to be a missile. Honestly, it looked more like one of the old Sputniks. Or maybe a really strangely shaped chair." She held up a hand in response to the Captain's quick grin. "And no, sir, I don't think it was a Sputnik or a chair. Just making a comparison."

Colonel Ball smirked. "That would be something, wouldn't it? I can see explaining to General Praley how we got bombed by a piece of furniture from outer space." This caused both Pye and Tillend to chuckle.

"Anyway, sir, according to the SIDELOOK radar, the object is between a meter and a half to two meters long and roughly a meter in diameter." She took a deep breath. "Off the record, sir, I'm willing to take a shot and call a meteor. Probably made of one of the softer types of rock rather than nickel or iron. Must have started out huge to keep that much mass after re-entry burn. We won't know until someone retrieves it."

Ball turned back to the board. "Is that 'best guess', Lieutenant?"

"Yes sir, I'd stand by it given what we know and what we don't." Pye gave a quick, curt nod. "Second best guess would be some sort of spacecraft debris or a dead sattelite. Lord knows there's enough of that crap hanging around in orbit. About a month ago we recorded the re-entry of a separated fuel tank from one of the Russian Venus missions from back in the 60s."

"Right. So either possibility sounds plausible." He took a quick glance at the Lieutenant. "Got anything else?"

"No sir."

He knew she would have told him, but he had to ask. "Radiologicals?"

"No sir. At least, not according to that new toy the people from Stark installed last month." She started to say something else, but stopped herself.

"What is it, Lieutenant."

"Well, sir, there was one other thing and it was really, really weird." Pye consulted her notes. "Thermal imaging showed the thing had naturally been heated up by atmospheric friction. However, at its warmest point, the object was still cooler than an object that had just burned through the air has any right to be. And according to the thermals, it cooled off far faster than could be explained by standard heat loss."

As they watched the big board, the red line indicating the object's projected course got shorter and shorter until finally the yellow circle marking the estimated point of impact began blinking red. "Still nothing on radiologicals?" Colonel Ball asked.

One of the technicians answered. "No sir. Still zero on radiologicals."

"Very well. Good work, everyone. Well done." The Colonel turned to Captain Tillend and his duty officer. "Okay, stand down from Alert One. I'm going to get on the horn to General Praley and see if we can't get a team spun up out of Mountain View. They're the closest to the impact site. Hopefully the General can convince them to go take a look at the impact site and confirm if its a meteor after all. In the mean-time, everyone carry on their regular duties."

The colonel picked up the phone at the control station and hurriedly tapped a series of numbers.

**XxxxxxX**

Four hours later, two Air Force search and rescue helicopters flew south from Mountain View Air Force Base in Idaho. It had taken them twenty minutes to reach the general area of the impact site in the Silver Island Mountains, and they'd been searching for another ten.

"Hotel-99, this is Hotel Lead. According to the map we can't be more than about a kick out from where our target came down. You spotted anything yet?" Major Doyle Duffy curved his HH60-G Pave Hawk helicopter on a slow left-leaning curve, all the while checking the ground with both radar and his night scope. So far, the only visible evidence for their target was the high-altitude contrail left by the object as it fell; the contrail was still glowing slightly from the heat of the meteor's passage and was only now seriously difusing because of the wind. Unfortunately, it didn't reach below 5000 feet anyway, making it useless as a means to find the fallen object.

The UFO and chemtrail wackadoos were no doubt going to get a lot of mileage from it, though. All Duffy knew was that, at six o'clock in the morning local, it looked pretty in the morning light, and he was of the opinion that the world could always use more pretty.

The voice of Lieutenant Phillip Mickelson, the pilot of the other helicopter, came back to him over the radio almost immediately. "Negative, Hotel Lead. I'm going to take the opposite curve and will meet you in the middle." Duffy watched as the trailing helicopter began a slow right-hand turn that mirrored his turn to the left.

"Roger, 99." Duffy responded. He nodded as he spoke, knowing that the other pilot wouldn't be able to see the gesture. Beside him his co-pilot, Lieutenant Jamie Hall, rolled her eyes at her pilot but didn't say anything. "Keep an eye out for anything unusual. According to NORAD, this meteor was really weird. They didn't tell me how, so keep your eyes open for anything."

"I still can't believe they deployed us to hunt for a rock." Hall's comment was sardonic and spot on. It had been an odd thing for the SAR crew to be tasked to do.

"You and me both, Jamie. You and me both." Apparently they'd been given the job because they were the ones spun up and ready to go. It was being listed as a training flight. "They didn't give me any real detail on this, so I figure we're doing Mushroom Duty."

Duffy's second in command just nodded. "Mushroom Duty" was informal code for any job Air Force personnel were given without any explanation, just a command to "get it done." The phrase's origins harkened back to the joke that mushrooms were "kept in the dark and fed a steady stream of bullshit."

"Right." Lieutenant Hall grimaced. "This is why I joined the Air Force, sir. So I could spend all night looking for rocks in the middle of Nevada." She shook her head and added, just softly enough to hear, "Like there aren't tons of rocks in Nevada..."

"Just remember, it could be worse. We could be making this search in Afghanistan. Or Iraq, heaven forfend." Duffy completed his turn and began another turn in the opposite direction, quartering the landscape as best as he could. "99, I'm starting my second turn."

The helicopter straightened out, extending its line for a hundred meters. He then angled it right.

"Roger. Second turn," was the only reply on the radio.

Hall's mouth tightened into a moue. "Wait. Is forfend even a word?"

Before the Major could reply, a deeper male voice sounded from the cabin behind them. "We're flying over a desert made of salt crystals. The only thing making Afghanistan worse than this are that there are people in Afghanistan shooting at us." Master Sergeant Aaron Cruz was the EMT for the flight. While their orders for this deployment didn't mention the possibility of casualties, Major Duffy had long ago learned that it was a dumb idea to ever leave base without his medic. "And even then, if I had to choose between being shot at and having to walk out of this shit if we crashed?" I think I'd take being shot at." Cruz concluded.

"Wait! I think I got something." Lieutenant Hall said. "Just about two o'clock. Looks like... okay, looks like a police cruiser, a fire truck, and an EMT bus. They've got their lights on; if they hadn't moved into the shadows I'd have missed them."

It took a moment for Duffy to spot what she was pointing at. "Good work. Let's go take a look." He angled his helicopter towards the ground vehicles. "99, this is lead, we've spotted a group of emergency vehicles. Probably heading for our target. Fall in behind me and we'll see what we see."

"Roger, lead." Within a minute the other chopper was in formation with him. The two aircraft did a careful fly-over of the first responders. The three vehicles were climbing an unpaved dirt path into the deeper into the Silver Islands.

"Anyone else wonder where they're going at this time in the morning in this empty and forbidding landscape?" Cruz asked from the back. His tone made it clear that he had no doubt at all in his mind where the civilian authorities were headed.

"Maybe we should ask them," the co-pilot observed.

"What an excellent idea." Duffy pushed a couple of buttons on the radio, searching from the operational channel to the standard civilian emergency channels. "Jaime, try and find a call sign; might be on a vehicke chassis. I'd hate to just call them i'Hey you, emergency guys'/i" He maneuvered his helicopter to the right side of the road, high enough to not spook the first responders while simultaneously being visible to them.

The radio locked onto the emergency channel and the helicopter crew could hear a smattering of chatter. It sounded like none of the first repsonders had noticed the two helicopters yet. That would change in a hurry. Helicopters were a lot of things, but quiet was not one of them. And those designed, as these two were, to be used to assist in rescues and disaster relief hav been made intentionally louder than the standard helicopter. It was all part of the design; a louder helicopter made it easier for stranded survivors to hear and, hopefully, signal. The sound of the rotors of this model of helicopter was as much a part of its "rescue equipment" as the MREs, blankets, and medical equipment that was kept on board.

Major Duffy listened for a call-sign from one of the vehicles. "Whatever happened to the days when police vehicles had their call-signs painted on the roof, like in _Adam 12_?"

"What's _Adam 12_?" Lieutenant Hall gave him a quizzical look.

Duffy just sighed, suddenly feeling very old. And he really wasn't all that old; he'd just turned 42 on his last birthday. "There was this TV show when I was a kid. It was originally broadcast during the 60s, but it was on as reruns in the 70s. Cop show. One of my favorite shows when I was growing up. It was about these two beat cops; a veteran named Pete Malloy and his partner, a rookie named Jim Reed. The call-sign of their squad car, which was 1-Adam-12, painted on the roof so police helicopters would know who they were. It was made by the same folks who made _Dragne_t and _Emergency_. Fantastic show." He paused and listened. "Okay, I think I got something." It allowed him to ignore Hall's muttered comment about having no idea what _Dragne_t or _Emergency_ were. Kid's today...

One of the vehicles had called another about the helicopters, using a call-sign. Duffy waited until the channel was clear, then broke in. "Rescue Victor David 8, this is US Air Force Hotel Flight. Hotel Lead speaking." He waited for the acknowledgement from the EMT bus before continuing. "We're out of Mountain Home and are under orders to investigate an object that fell out of the sky near here. Can we render any assistance?"

There was a moment as the people in the vehicles below him registered his presence and what he had just told them.

"Roger, Hotel Flight. This is Kilo Lima 14; I'm in the Sheriff's Department vehicle. We'll take any assistance you want to give us. There's small groups of cabins all over these mountains. Most are empty except hunting season, but we do have a small population of home-industry silver miners up here all year round. Given the meteor and all, County figured we aught to come up and check, make sure everyone's all right."

There was a pause. "You could see that thing burning through the air for miles, so we figured it was gonna be a big one."

"Roger, 14," Duffy responded. "Understood. Hotel 99 and myself will fly ahead and see what we can see and report back to you." The Major switched back to his regular frequences and said, "99, Hotel Lead. Did you copy?"

"Roger, Lead."

"Okay, let's get ahead of the first responders and see if they know where they're going any better than we do."

There was a chuckle from the other helicopter pilot. "Roger. That would be nice for a change."

**XxxxxxX**

Fifteen minutes later, Lieutenant Mickelson, the pilot of Hotel-99, signaled that they had found something. Major Duffy circled his craft around and came in close, hovering almost nose to nose with the second chopper. Hotel-99 had its spotlight on, panning it across a large crater. The hole in the ground had to be thirty feet deep and at least three times as wide.

What had caught the attention of Hotel-99's crew was the halo of expelled rock and dirt surrounding the crater. That led them to the center of the hole. A circle of light as bright as daylight crossed the crater once, twice, and then settled on the center. A few minutes later, Hotel Lead's spotlight did the same. First it scanned the area to make sure they weren't missing something before settling on the center of the hole.

"Well," Major Duffy said after a moment. "There's something you don't see every day. You seeing this, Mick?"

"Yeah, I'm seeing it. Don't believe it, but I'm seeing it." Mickelson's voice was steady. Air Force pilots, even their helicopter pilots, were trained to never lose their cool. Its unlikely that Mickelson's voice would have betrayed any emotion if the man had been on fire.

Lying on her side in the dead center of the crater was the last thing he ever expected to see: a completely nude woman. She had blonde hair, but otherwise Duffy couldn't see any details other than she looked uninjured. This was odd enough. A person falling from the upper atmosphere would have been a charcoal briquette; not to mention smushed to a pulp from the impact. This woman looked unharmed.

"I think we're about to disrupt her nap," came Mickelson's voice.

Duffy chuckled. Then he put his radio back on the local emergency channel. "Kilo Lima 14, this is Hotel Lead. We've found what looks like the impact site. We have a crater here ten meters deep by thirty meters wide." His co-pilot softened the brightness, allowing the projected spot to get wider, if slightly dimmer. "14, it looks like we've got one casualty. We've got two medics with us; we're dropping them into the crater but will await your arrival for further action unless otherwise necessary."

"Uh, roger that, Hotel Lead. We can see you guys up ahead. Looks like we'll be there in six or seven minutes."

"Six or seven minutes, roger." Duffy turned his head toward the third man in the chopper. "Okay, Cruz, you're up." He signaled Hotel-99 and ordered the deployment of their medic.

"Roger, Lead. Buck is getting prepped as we speak. We were just waiting your word."

"Roger. Tell Buck he can deploy as he's ready." Duffy turned his attention to his crew. Lieutenant Hall had climbed into the back and was helping Cruz rig himself to a rapelling line. The man already had his full kit on his back.

"I got to say, Major, I don't know how much good me and Eddie are gonna be." Cruz said as he hooked the line to his harness. "Either she was hit by the meteor, in which case she ain't walking away from this, or else she was the meteor, in which case she hit hard and ain't walking away from this."

"I get you, Sergeant. But our's is not to wonder why..."

"Yeah, yeah." The medic grinned at his pilot. "Okay, give me five seconds on the drop, sir!"

"Five seconds, roger." Duffy hit his radio. "Mick, tell Buck that Cruz is about to drop. He's going in five, four, three..." the pilot turned his head to see Airman Buck, the other helicopter's medic, drop out of the side door, sliding easily to the ground on the extended line. Trust Buck to want to beat Cruz to the ground.

"Okay, Jaime get on the horn to that ambulance crew, make sure they understand about the casualty. They should only be a couple of minutes out by now." Duffy adjusted his position in regard to the other helicopter. The spotlight stayed where it was, but the downdraft from the rotors onto the crater ended. He nodded to himself as he watched Mickelson do the same.

"No reason to make it hard for the medics," he commented to no one in particular.

**XxxxxxX**

Aaron Cruz hit the ground just a few seconds after Buck. He unhooked himself from the rapel line and watched as it retracted itself into a reel on the helicopter. Satisfied that the line was no longer flapping loose in the helicopter's downdraft, he did an initial equipment check. It was redundant; he'd checked his gear before dropping out of the helicopter. But the redundant check was habit. Only when he was certain he had all the gear he needed for a triage assessment did he turn toward the body in the middle of the crater.

The two medics did an initial appraisal of the woman, then very gently moved her on to her back. As the senior-ranked medic, Cruz took the lead in reporting back to his pilot. "Okay. We have a Caucasian female, anywhere between fifteen and twenty one. Hard to say more precise than that. Hard to get a height, what with her laying down, but I'd say she's at least as tall as I am. Muscular. Looks like an athlete."

The only reply was acknowledgement of his report. This was his show until the locals arrived, so no one was going to override him or countermand him.

Buck pressed a couple of fingers into her neck just below the jawline, checking for a pulse. He was in that position for longer than usual. His head cocked to one side as he moved his fingers higher on the woman's neck. Then he nodded to Cruz. "Its thready and weak, but its there. I'd hate to guess what her BP is." the younger medic reported. That said, the medic began to unlimber the blood-pressure cuff.

While Buck did that, Cruz began the procedure EMTs sometimes jokingly referred to as "the rub down;" the careful check for possible broken bones done my feeling the limbs, chest, hips and skull with the hands. "No apparent broken bones. We do have heavy bruising on the woman's legs, arms, and chest. Some abbrasions on her face and extremities. Only minor bleeding and even that appears to have stopped on its own."

"I'm getting no BP read at all, Cruz. Nothing. Needle isn't even ticking over. But I swear, I read a pulse!" Buck unstrapped the cuff and put it back on her. He inflated the cuff, and then released, trying again to read the girl's blood pressure. "Still nothing."

Cruz felt at the woman's neck. He too could feel a weak but steady pulse. "Okay, I got a pulse here too. Never mind blood pressure for right now. Move on." He reached into his backpack and pulled an infrared thermometer and stuck the end of it into one of the woman's ears. After a few seconds it beeped, and he dutifully recorded the result. "Her temp is only 90 degrees. I'm grabbing a blanket and a heat pack."

Buck nodded and took a penlight and flashed it into her eyes to check responsiveness. "Pupils are dialated and unresponsive."

Cruz draped the woman with the bright orange survival blanket, then cracked open a couple of the chemical heat packs and placed them along her body at the standard heat loss points. He suddenly found himself staring at the woman. She was, to put it crudely, massively mamalian. Cruz shook himself suddenly. _What the hell am I doing?_ This wasn't the first naked woman he'd treated. He checked for signs of breathing, and couldn't find any.

"Buck, grab an inhalator! She's not breathing!" With that, Cruz bent over the woman, straightened her head slightly, opened her mouth, cleared her tongue, took as deep a breath as he could, covered the woman's mouth in his, and exhaled. It was like he was trying to fill an oxygen tank. Her chest didn't even move as he breathed for her, and the effort to force air into her lungs almost made him dizzy. Nevertheless, he did it again, pausing only to motion Buck toward her so he could start chest compressions. As Cruz sat up to get a bigger lungful of air, he noticed that Buck was putting his full weight on the woman's chest and wasn't moving it at all.

At the fifth exhale, he felt something change. The woman inhaled, very slowly, and just as slowly exhaled. He watched, dumbfounded, as the woman didn't respirate at all for what seemed like minutes. And then, like clockwork, she did it again. Slow inhale, slow exhale.

"Eddie, stop. She's breathing... but its way slow and shallow. Time this for me." The two of them watched the second hand on their watches go around nearly four times before the woman took another breath. It stunned them to the point that neither of them noticed when the first responders pulled up.

**XxxxxxX**

To Cruz, it looked like the two County EMTs, who gave their names as Roberta Rush and Frank Webber, were as confused by the situation as he and Buck had been. Cruz had given the two men his report when they arrived, then assisted with placing electrodes for the EKG. The same EKG that was not reading a thing, for some reason. All four medics could feel a pulse; they could tangibly experience proof that the woman's heart was beating, however slowly, and that she was breathing, however slowly. But they were getting no indication of it from the monitor. To make matters worse, the electrodes just weren't sticking for some reason. They did get a result from the finger cuff; it measured pressure changes in the finger, and not the electrical output of the heart.

He had watched, amazed, as they wasted three IV starters on the woman, trying to get her started on a saline drip. Nothing they had could penetrate her skin. In the end, the four medics decided that the best they could do was wrap her up and get her to a hospital. Major Duffy had agreed to ferry the woman to Universal Medical Center in Salt Lake City, the closest trauma-rated emergency room.

"Okay, Major, drop the gurney." Cruz and the other three medics watched as Hall tipped the mobile stretcher out the helicopter's side door, winching it downward.

"Hey! What are you guys doing?" It was Zipp, the Tooele County deputy sheriff. Almost as soon as Cruz had spoken to the man, he had decided that this person was a disgrace to his badge. Racial prejudice oozed out of the man's pores. Cruz's reaction to Zipp, whose first name was Arnold or Ardwright or Adolf or something like that, was only made worse by the fact that he kept calling Cruz son.

Cruz, a senior non-commissioned officer in the Air Force, was proud of his accomplishments in the military and refused to be condescended to anyone. To say that what he really wanted to do was knock this pendejo jerk-off on his ass was understating the situation.

"We're moving her to the hospital in Salt Lake City. We can't treat her out here."

"Say that again, son?"

Gritting his teeth, Cruz repeated what he had said. "There are too many strange things going on. We don't have the equipment to treat her out here. So we're moving her to a hospital."

"Strange things? That what you call it? You can't stick a needle in her arm without it bending or breaking, you can't get your electrowhachimacallit machine to read her. Not to mention how she fell out of the fucking sky buck-nekkid without getting' kilt! That the strange things you talking about, boy?"

Cruz couldn't help but react. "Don't call me boy and don't call me son. I am a senior non-commissioned officer in the Air Force. You call me Master Sergeant, or just Sergeant if you must. You call me boy or son one more time, and you and me will have words."

The deputy looked slightly amused. "Whatever you say, flyboy." iOh he did not just do that./i "I've already put a word in. SHIELD's gonna want to take a look at your little mutie girl there."

"Officer," Cruz began, knowing that deputy sheriffs hated being called 'officer' as much as Air Force personnel hated being called 'flyboy.' "I don't know where you're getting your intel, but we've seen no real indication that she's a mutant. That's just supposition on your part."

"No indication she's a mutant?" The Deputy's grin was cruel and unpleasant. "My fat white ass! How about all those problems you were having with her? How about the fact that she fell out of the sky so hard she made a crater." The deputy's smirk was downright evil. "What's the matter? Get a good close look at a set of huge tits like that, and suddenly you can't think but with your little head?"

Cruz was suddenly in the other man's face. "You better secure that shit." He pointed back toward the crater, just to drive the point home. "We don't know who she is, or how she came to be here, and can't really tell if she's injured. But she's still an injured human being, and as such she deserves our respect and our care and does not deserve your pathetic creepy eyes all over her. Do you understand me?"

The Deputy wasn't giving ground at all. His eyes narrowed as he growled, "You'd better take a step back right now, boy, or else I may have to put you in cuffs for attempted assault on a law enforcement officer."

"And just what do you think will happen to you if you try that?" Cruz stared into the man's eyes, hoping he'd get the hint.

The deputy just smirked. "Fine. Whatever. Go take care of your precious mutie girl. Like I said, I've already talked to my Captain, and he's calling SHIELD as we speak, and they'll put her in prison where she belongs." Cruz almost punched the guy in the teeth just on general principles. If there was one thing that pushed all of Cruz's buttons, it was a bigoted asshole, even if he wasn't all that fond of the group the bigoted targeted himself. And this deputy was a huge, flaming bigoted asshole.

Cruz gave the guy up as a bad job and a waste of time. He walked back down the wall of the crater to the rest of the rescue crew. Buck was directing things; Cruz had put him in charge while he had gone to talk to the cop. Buck had seen Cruz's face as the senior medic approached. "There a problem?" The look on Cruz's face said it all. "I take it the officer said something untoward?"

"Deputy Douche-Bag apparently has a hard-on for putting mutants in prison just because they were born. He figures she's a mutant because..." Cruz made a motion with his hands mimicking something falling from the sky. "Plus, he made a crude remark about her... um..." Cruz put his hands up in the universal male symbol for a well-endowed woman, causing Buck to grin slightly. Cruz dropped his hands and shrugged. "Guy says his superior is on the phone to SHIELD, about her, and that they're likely to meet us at UMC."

"Well, I don't know if she's a mutant, but she's definitely seen better days." Rush said as she helped guide the gurney into place. "She's one solid bruise. You know, I'd wonder where she had her work done, if she didn't lack the scars. I don't envy her the back problems. My sister wasn't that big and had to get reduction surgery done."

Talk ceased when the gurney hit the bottom of the crater. The four medics moved it until it was as flat as possible and as close as possible to the woman as they could it. Cruz positioned himself at her feet while Webber took her shoulders. "Okay," Cruz said. "On three. Ready?" At Webber's nod, he counted. "One... two... three..." and he lifted.

Or rather, he tried his best to lift the woman onto the gurney. She hadn't budged, and Cruz almost dropped her legs.

The two medics stopped and straighened up, and Webber grabbed at his back.

"Wow." Cruz looked down at the woman, then back up to Webber. "What do you think? Four hundred? Maybe five?"

"What's up?" Buck asked.

"She's too heavy for the two of us to move. We're gonna need your help. She's got to be close to five hundred pounds easy." Cruz moved so he was straddling the woman's knees. "You to get on either side of her."

"She sure don't look like no five hundred pounds, even with as much muscle as she had on her. I'd have pegged her at one-eighty maybe." Rush moved to the woman's right side as Buck took her left.

"Okay, let's try this again. On three... one... two..." All four lifted this time, and managed to get her onto the gurney. Buck and Rush began strapping her in as Cruz stretched. Webber stayed bent over for a while.

"Christ Jesus, she's heavy," was all the man had to say.

With their patient strapped to the mobile bed at the knees, belt-line, and shoulders they put neckbrace on her to hold her head still, then used the four-contact pulley to drag the gurney out of the crater.

"Come on." Cruz took the handle on one end of the gurney. "Let's get her secured in the back of the chopper. Don't want her breaking loose and rolling around in the back while we're flying."

The flight to the hospital was a long forty minutes. The girl never stirred, though her breathing sped up at one point (going from a rather frightening one breath per four minutes to a comparatively Olympian breath per two minutes), but even that "excitement" had faded swiftly as the woman resumed her slow, almost imperceptible rate of respiration. For the rest of the flight, there was nothing. Just the constant sound of the helicopter's engines and the beep-blooping of the monitor attached to the woman's finger cuff.

The flight to the hospital was a long forty minutes.

**XxxxxxX**

**Author's Note the First:** Xander Harris belongs to Mutant Enemy. Power Girl belongs to Time/Warner. SHIELD, the Avengers, and the rest of the Marvel Universe belongs to Disney (more's the pity). Everything else belongs to me.

**Author's Note the Second:** After a couple of long talks with a pair of Joe's (Hundredaire over on TtH and Vasquez here on FF.N), I became convinced that a deep and intense restructuring and rewrite of this story was drastically necessary. This is that rewrite. Consider the "original" **_Origin Story_ **to be abandoned in favor of this one.


	2. Now For Something Completely Different

**And Now For Something Completely Different**

**XxxxxxX**

_"What people can and cannot survive comes as a constant shock to people. One man can go to war and be caught in an explosion and seemingly be blown to bits, and dies sixty years later of old age. Another man can trip and fall on a perfectly smooth linoleum floor and die of a broken neck. And there's absolutely no prediction how things are going to work out, either." _- **Damien Hirst**

**XxxxxxX**

Doctor Aubrey "Call Me Dr. Bree" Tolliver flipped from page to page, wondering if she should even try to find a way to stop this. The entire thing smacked of things she thought she was better off not contemplating. The Jane Doe patient had only been in the hospital for two days, and they'd barely scratched the surface with her, when all of a sudden the Man showed up waving warrants and writs and other things. And now Jane Doe was going away to some government facility, probably never to see the light of day again.

Lester Herdt, the hospital's director and a man Dr. Tolliver always considered to be more than a little rat-like, stood next to her watching as the SHIELD agents packed the girl into what honestly looked like an eight foot long obsidian tylenol. The tube had a viewport that let one see the girl, and one side had a monitor station of some kind, but mostly the thing reminded Dr. Tolliver of an unfired photon torpedo from _Star Trek_. On the other side of her stood Agent Bart Copella of SHIELD, the man who came armed with court documents.

Doctor Tolliver had been an emergency room doctor pretty much full-time since she graduated from UCLA in 1982. She'd found that she thrived from the chaos. And in those two plus decades, she'd thought she'd seen it all. From the woman who managed to somehow swallow three soup spoons to the man who'd come in complaining he'd cut his finger only to reveal that he'd cut it off to the man who had driven himself to the emergency room and checked himself for treatment after somehow shooting himself through the head and surviving. Granted it was a small caliber bullet, but still. Weird, right?

But this high-tech medical kidnapping was a first for her.

"You know, Les, I'm still not sure this is the right thing to do. I mean, she's our patient."

"Hey, I'm not arguing with you, Doc. This is a bit questionable on our part. And to be honest, its really, really bizarre for me" Agent Copella responded in place of the director. "I certainly didn't join shield so I could shove young girls into tubes, you know? I joined to fight the bad guys. But we all have to do what we all have to do, and right now, I have to take her to a SHIELD facility. And officially, she's no longer your patient. She's now SHIELD's patient."

"But why?" She turned toward Copella. "I still don't understand your interest in this girl."

"Well... for the most part that's classified. But you know how it is" The man shrugged.

"No, I don't, really. I mean, I do have to admit we don't get many like her on any given day. We just don't know anything about her." She was fishing, she knew she was fishing, and it was a good bet the agent knew she was fishing. He, unfortunately, wasn't biting. "Where exactly are you taking her? Are you just shoving her in a lab somewhere, or are you taking her to a real hospital?"

"Doc, I understand your concern, but I can't answer that question. I can assure you that her medical care is not ending. We do have agents who are fully trained and accredited medical doctors, ya know, and they are the ones who will be looking after her from now on." To his credit, Copella looked honestly embarrased by the whole mess.

The medical technician who was supervising the Jane Doe's transport gave Copella the high sign and the team began moving out. Copella turned to the Doctor. His face expressed compassion. "Look, Doc... I'll give you a call when our young lady gets to where she's going. I can't tell you where it's gonna be, but I can at least let you know she's going to be safe and sound, okay?"

The agent shook their hands. "You guys have a nice day, now." And with that, he followed his team out to their vehicle.

**XxxxxxX**

Allan Edgar was a scientifically-minded person. He tried to remain professional and unemotional while pursuing his work because in his opinion that was the best way to stay objective and to get to the real truth of the matter. That ideal had served him when he was in medical school, and then later when he got his secondary doctorate in biochemistry. And it was with this attitude that Doctor Edgar approached the problem of the girl.

He pulled the non-stick tape off of the contact side of the electrodes and placed them, one by one, on the girl's chest. He put two of them just above the beginning swell of her breasts (she'd been laying out naked in front of him for so long that Edgar no longer noticed that she was unclothed; besides, he was a professional, and she was a minor), one just below the sternum, and then two on either side of her abdomen. Doctor Edgar noted the position of the electrodes on his clipboard, took one last glance at the girl, then hit the start button on the electrocardiograph.

He waited a few seconds for the electrodes to begin picking up a signal from the girl's heart. And waited. And waited. And waited.

Nothing.

Frowning, Doctor Edgar looked back at the girl. The cuff on her finger definitely was reading a pulse. But the EKG was blank. _What was going on?_ He asked himself.

Making a decision, Doctor Edgar approached the girl again and reached toward the electrodes. It was possible that the leads had corroded or become abbraided or otherwise damaged. So, he'd disconnect the leads, go get some new ones, and try again. He grabbed the end of the lead, applied slight pressure... and then stood there open-mouthed when the entire electrode, lead and all, came up off of the girl's chest as easily as one might take the top post-it from a stack.

_That shouldn't have happened_, he thought to himself. He knew from personal experience that the adhesive used on medical electrodes was so strong that the least painful method for removing them from one's body was just to wait until they inevitably fell off in a week or two. Actually trying to pull them off was a good way to tear one's skin open, the glue was so strong. And here one was, coming up as if the girl's skin was made of teflon.

Doctor Edgar gave a very gentle tug on one of the other electrodes. It too came up off the girl's body as easy as you please. So did the third one. He stared at the one remaining electrode before poking a finger at it. The electrode slid across the girl's abdomen, responding to the pressure of his fingers, as if it was a puck on an air hockey table.

"Oh hey, look at _that_." He said, curious. "Joyce? Joyce!" He called over his shoulder to his lab partner. "Come here and look at this!"

A minute later, he was demonstrating his discovery to the other doctor. "If I'm seeing this right, these aren't actually in contact with her skin. Look!"

The other doctor, Joyce McGeorge, leaned way down until her face was almost touching the girl's body. She carefully pushed the electrode around in a small circle on the girl's form. "I think you're right... I... I don't think its actually touching." She raised her eyes to meet his. "What do you figure? Frictionless skin? Micro-thin force field? Some sort of spatial warp thing?"

"No idea," Doctor Edgar grinned like a thief. "But its pretty cool. I'm going with the force field."

"Think O'Toole will let us wheel his laser in here to test it?" McGeorge couldn't contain her enthusiasm any more than Edgar could.

**XxxxxxX**

"Okay, the eggheads have had a week to figure this girl out." Senior Agent in Charge Lawrence Understone stared at the girl in question through the slightly hazy glass of a two-way mirror. She was laid out on a laboratory table, and the aforementioned eggheads were doing something sciency to her. "So what do we know?" He turned slightly to glance at Bart Copella, his second-in-command. He even raised a single Spock-like eyebrow to enforce the question.

Unfortunately, Copella could only shrug. "Less than you're gonna like, boss." He shuffled through the file. "We did a fingerprint trace and it almost immediately popped up with a file. Karen Starr of Midvale, Ohio. Population 754 souls. Man, I can't even imagine living in a town that small."

"Wait... her name is Karen Starr? Really?" Understone snorted. "Her parents intentionally gave her a stripper name?"

Copella shared in the moment of humor, then continued. "Anyway, let's see: born May 25, 1989, making her all of seventeen years old. Naturally blonde hair..."

"Naturally? How do we know?" Understone asked, knowing what was coming. "Oh, don't tell me..."

"Yep. Carpet matches the drapes, boss. Blue eyes. She's six foot, one and a half inches tall, and she weighs in at five hundred and forty seven pounds, if you can believe it. She's in good shape, I'll give her that. She's not quite one of those gross female body-builders, but its clear that she's been working out. She's a big girl, all right." Copella looked up for a moment and grinned in that sly way that he had. "In more ways than one, you've probably noticed. As far as anyone can tell, those are real, by the way."

That caused Understone to whistle with incredulity. "And she's only 17? Ouch... I hope she's got a good chiropractor. Her back must be killing her all the damn time."

"No doubt. Turns out she's a 40-H." Copella was barely keeping his face straight.

Understone rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Can you explain to me, Agent Copella, why on earth anyone in this facility felt the need to actually find out what that underage female's bust size happened to be? Do the words 'civil rights violation' mean anything to anyone around here? Not to mention the phrase 'criminal sexual conduct with a minor?' Does that register on anyone's radar?"

Copella's previous grin vanished in an instant. "Boss, you're absolutely right. I'll talk to whoever it turns out did this and make sure that we're very, very angry with them."

"No, what you'll do is you will find out whichever jackass it was that molested a minor in order to find out how big her tits are and will have their resignation letter on my desk by 1700 hours. And as you walk them out of the building, you will make sure they understand that they are getting off very, very lightly. Is that understood?"

Copella nodded, swiftly. "Yes, sir. Their already packed and out of here. They just don't know it."

Understone gritted his teeth. "Jesus, Bart... that... that's just way too far. I know we don't get a lot of oversight at this place, but everyone here needs to remember that our new boss is a lady and won't appreciate the same old Old Boy's Club bullshit."

"Sure, boss. I'll make sure the rank and file know."

Understone just nodded. He took a series of deep breaths to calm himself. "Okay, what else?"

"Oh, yeah, sorry." Copella consulted the file again. "Her pupils are dialated and don't respond to light. She shows no reaction to loud noises or minor electric shocks. She has one distinguishing scar, on her left heel. The Doc who discovered it says it looks more like an innoculation scar than anything else. No tattoos; not even the typical teenage tramp stamp all the girls seem to be getting. Oh, she's got no dental work, and..."

That one caused Understone to interrupt. "No dental work? So what. So she's a conscientious tooth-brusher. She flosses. Big deal."

"Apparently it _is_ a big deal, boss. According to the forensic dentist we had take a look at her teeth, that's odd as Hell for someone her age to have no dental work. I mean, most of us have at least one filling, right? Oh, the dentist said that she also doesn't have her adult wisdom teeth yet, which confirms her age."

Copella once more consulted the file. "Her parents are Fred and Edna Starr. He's a farmer of some sort; he's got a record for the occasional drunk and disorderly and there's a couple of DV calls on his sheet as well. Mom teaches at the local elementary. As for our girl, there, she has a juvie record. That's where the fingerprint match came from. Minor stuff." Copella flipped some more pages. "The usual kids stuff. Low-value shoplifting, pot posession." At the last one, Understone raised another eyebrow. "Like I said, kid's stuff. And even then, not a whole lot of it. Casual use levels. Nothing too desperado."

Understone had to surpress a laugh. "Nothing too desperado. I like that." After a week, the only thing he'd heard from the doctors was how utterly confused by this kid they really were. It was obvious she was a superhuman of some kind or other; she fell out of the sky like a meteor and crashed into a mountain and survived. If that doesn't scream super-powers, Understone didn't know what did. So here she lay, in his secret SHIELD-controlled medical center.

"Typical kid, then?" Understone watched the scientists put the girl back in her isolation pod. She was unmoving, as was usual for people stuck in one of the pods. Understone had to admit that he didn't know a thing about that particular piece of equipment. It somehow kept the patient pacified by altering its interior atmosphere, while simultaneously reading everything about the patient up to and including their Social Security Number. He had no idea how it worked; he had degrees n Political Science, Criminology, and Law, not medicine nor in engineering.

"Well, yes and no. The last notation in her juvie record is that she was reported missing by her mother two years ago. Local sheriff decided she was a runaway. Guess we found her." Copella closed the file.

"I'm sure her parents will be relieved we found her, then. So what else do we know?"

"Not as much as we should. She's an enigma wrapped in a very pretty mystery. Nothing in her record suggests superpowers prior to her taking a dive into a mountain. No had no clothing, no cash, no idea, absolutely no indication of where she's been for the past two years." Copella consulted the file again. "If the fingerprints hadn't panned out, we'd have no idea who this girl was."

"What do you mean?" Understone turned away from the window.

"Well, DNA testing has failed every time. The Doc who ran the test said that her cells are apparently resistant to every DNA test they've thought up so far. They tried to take a blood sample from her arm in case they needed to know her blood type, and every needle they tried to use bent. So they tried to get one from inside her mouth. Same thing happened. One of the doctors tried making a small cut with a diamond saw; the blade wouldn't penetrate her skin. We've contacted Stark Industries and talked to one of their developers over there about getting some adamantium needles and scalpels made up."

"Well, there goes our budget for the rest of the year."

"Sorry boss. Anyway, the X-ray tech says the same thing: she apparently reads like she's made of some kind of rock. MRI's too... they won't penetrate. One of the techs is trying to figure out a way to get her under a..." he consulted the chart. "Something called a... a... 'scanning tunneling electron microscope' that apparently uses a stream of subatomic particles to look at really small things, just to see what would happen."

"So, what, the doctors don't know anything about her?"

"Not quite, boss. Not quite." Copella closed the file again and stared at the girl in the tube. "Pressure sensors are doing just fine. We can read her heartbeat, for example, from the flutter in her fingers caused by her pulse. He can tell how often she breathes from the rise and fall of her chest, and from air movement in the tube. We can tell her body temperature from an infrared meter. Anything else?" Copella shrugged. "Its like she's made of titanium, boss."

"That would explain her weight," Understone said vaguely.

"That does remind me... one of the lab techs thinks that she actually has a skin-tight force field. According to this guy, when he tried to put electrodes on her chest, he noticed that they didn't quite touch her skin. He showed me a couple of images, but I didn't see it. Who knows, maybe he's right."

"That would be interesting. Do we have any actual proof of that, though?" Understone was trying to discourage speculation.

"No real proof, no. Doctor Edgar wanted to put her under a high powered laser, but I vetoed that as soon as I heard of it."

"Good call."

"One more thing, boss. Doctor McGeorge thinks we should take her out of the pod permanently. She says its not doing us or the girl any good."

That got Understone's attention. "And her justification?"

"According to Doctor McGeorge, the girl is metabolizing the anesthetic gas we're using to keep her under." Copella grinned at the expression on Understone's face. "Yeah, she's apparently breathing it in, absorbing part of it, metabolizing part of it, and exhaling a changed chemical mix of the air and the anesthetic. Doctor McGeorge says that its likely that the girl is immune to it and her body is just treating it as just another part of the air to be breathed."

"So all we're doing is wasting the knock-out gas on someone not affected by it?" At Copella's nod he sighed. "Great... so we're not keeping the girl out, she's just not waking up for some reason. Do the doctor's have any idea why she's unconscious?"

"Might have something to do with slamming into a mountain at a couple hundred miles an hour."

"Yeah, that would do it." Understone laughed at that thought. It was, after all, obvious. "Okay, approved. Get her out of the pod, find her a room, and put her in a bed. We might as well make her comfortable while she's here, and who knows, maybe she'll wake up."

Copella agreed and turned to leave, but he was brought up short by Understone's next words. "She's not registered, and she has super-powers; hopefully she'll play smart. Otherwise, we'll be shipping her off to the Gulag." Understone's entire demeanor soured. He hated the Gulag. Hated it with a passion. "Make sure she's under restraint. As dense and heavy as she is, I wouldn't be surprised if she was superhumanly strong to some level." The cuffs and cables they used as restraints were all made of secondary adamantium, and were fitted with motion detectors. They'd hold the girl and let them know if she moved in any unusual ways. Well, unusual for an unconscious person, that is.

The power dampener had been designed by a mutant genius called Forge, for just such occasions as these.

"You think she's about to wake up, boss?"

Understone snorted. "I haven't the first fucking clue, but I would think we would want to be careful, just in case. This girl did survive pancaking into the ground, after all."

"Right. We'll get the cuffs on her, and then she won't be going anywhere without our letting her do it."

"Okay, good. Good. That's good." Understone glanced quickly at his second in command. "By the way, Bart. Just asking, nothing really important at all. But do we have any reinforced beds? Because I have a sudden image in my head of her tearing down a corridor, trying to escape, chained to a broken off chunk of hospital bed with invulnerable shackles."

To Understone, the fallen look on Bart Copella's face made up for the earlier anger and aggravation.

**XxxxxxX**

And while he slept, Xander Harris dreamed.

_Xander banked left. He barely noticed the temperature of the air as he cut through it like a missile. One arm was held straight in front of him, the other was at his side. It was just an affectation; Clark had once told him that he used to use that pose to make sure he had a sightline on the horizon, but that never seemed to make sense to Xander._

_A flash of color caused him to look to his left. Buffy was there, dressed in her usual red, gold, and blue. The gold of the eagle on her chest drew Xander's eyes to her bustline, as if it were designed to do so. He heard her cough and mutter, "Eyes up here, Xander" and abruptly shifted his gaze. On his other side, he heard Willow's voice admonishing him for being a guy._

_He shot a grin at Willow, surrounded by the glowing green nimbus generated from her power ring. She never really understood why Willow insisted on wearing a mask. Its not like Buffy wore won. Neither did he, for that matter._

_In any case, it was time to get down to business. Brainiac wasn't going to defeat himself. He found himself sitting in a white wicker chair. There were three other identical chairs, each inhabited by a woman in a wedding gown. One was white, one was black, and one was red._

_The woman in the white wedding gown pushed her face up and away from her face, and it was Buffy. Buffy took sip from the china cup in her hand. "There will always be a Brainiac, Xander. I think its more important that we get Miss Calendar's homework assignment finished."_

_The woman in black raised her veil, and the look on Willow's face ended the argument. Xander could never argue with Resolve Face. He picked up his teacup and took a sip. It was grape Nehi. Grape nehi had always been Walter O'Reilly's favorite._

_The woman in red revealed herself to be Cordelia Chase. "I find it endlessly fascinating how your instincts are so highly attuned when it comes to boring old evil, but you have yet to make any mention these fabulous new shoes."_

_One by one, the girls stood and kissed him. Not the usual friendly peck on the cheek, but the kind of kiss he'd always dreamed about experiencing but never had. The Bogart and Bacall style kiss. The kind of kiss you always dreamed Cyd Charisse giving you after that climactic dance number. And when they were done, Buffy and leaned to whisper into his ear. It tickled. "You think you know who you are, what's to come." Straightening up, she tapped him on the chest. "You haven't even begun."_

_Xander looked down at the hole that appeared in the middle of his body. He could see light through it. The thought made him angry for some reason. "You know, people have always asked me why I have this hole right here," he said to the three young women. He brought a hand up in a poor attempt to cover the hole. "They think I'm showing off, or just being lewd. But the first time I made this costume, I wanted to have a symbol." He pointed to Willow. "Like you. I just couldn't think of anything. I thought, eventually, I'd figure it out and close the hole. But I haven't."_

_"The problem with substituting an idea for your self is that eventually the idea becomes yourself. When you stare into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you." Cordelia sang. She clapped her hands, and everything went white..._

_Buffy's voice, coming out of nowhere. "We need to know what we are going to do when the time comes."_

_But this Xander could answer. "We do the same thing we've always done. Save the world."_

_Willow overturned her cup and a thick, red liquid oozed from it onto the ground. "Sometimes the world doesn't want to be saved..."_

**XxxxxxX**

And while he slept, Xander Harris dreamed.

_Xander slouched over to where Willow and Buffy were talking, trying very hard to not project just how angry and humiliated he was feeling. Behind him, Cordelia and her pack of assistant sociopaths were giggling at him. He felt an inch tall, but a bet was a bet and he was a man of his word. He would not let Cordelia Chase, of all people, see how thoroughly she had got the better of him, even while she was in the midst of getting the better of him._

_"Hey there, Xan-Man!" Buffy's smile was bright and uplifting and usually made Xander feel miled better about himself. She was the one girl he knew who considered him as a person without any sort of preconceived notions. Even Willow, sad to say, approached Xander with some idea of what he ought to be like instead of how he really was. It was one of the reasons why Xander was in love with Buffy._

_Oh sure, he knew he didn't have a chance with her, and deep inside he'd admitted it. But every time she smiled at him, he felt that maybe, somewhere in the future maybe, he still might be able to convince her._

_"You know, its a lovely thought, but its sad. Its not like you're ever going to get the chance to find out if I could ever return the feelings. There's just not enough there there." Buffy said casually. "Sorry, kid. You got the gift, but it looks like you're waiting for something."_

_"What?"_

_"Your next life, maybe. Who knows? That's the way these things go." Buffy shrugged._

_Willow gave him a look that was entirely inappropriate for two people who considered each other to be siblings. Of course, he knew Willow didn't want to look at him as a sibling, but he'd grown up with Willow as his sister. It was way too late to change now._

_"So what costume did you get?" Before Xander could resist, Buffy had the bag out of his hands and open. She stared, open-mouthed, at the white leotard, the blue boots, the blue gloves, the gold belt. That was bad enough. But then she had to go and pull the gag boobs out of the bag. "Really? Is there something you wanted to tell us, Xander?" He could feel his face turning the same shade as cooling lava._

_"I lost a bet with Cordelia, and this is her idea of a joke. If I won, I got to pick her costume. If she won, she got to pick mine. Cordelia is She of the Winning, and I am He of the Utter Humiliation."_

_Willow pulled the gag butt out of the bag. "Who is this supposed to be, anyhow?" She dropped the appliance back in the bag, only to pull the blonde fright wig out._

_"Power Girl." The girl's responded to this revelation with nothing but a blank look. "You know...Power Girl? Superman's cousin? Kryptonian maid of might? She of the really huge..." He held his hands cupped in front of is chest, bouncing them up and down quickly. Buffy's expression immediately turned dark and menacing. "... tracts of land?" Xander finished weakly._

_Willow and Buffy just stared at him._

_Willow coughed, lightly, and asked, "Isn't Superman's cousin Supergirl?"_

_Xander's surprise must have been visible on his face, because Willow swiftly added, "Hey, I occasionally paid attention when you'd start lecturing about superheroes, buster! And besides, I know I've seen pictures of a girl dressed like Superman. She's got this tight little leotard and a headband and this mini-skirt that shows off her... I'm going to shut up now." Willow's blush was tangible._

_"This is Superman's other girl cousin." Still blank stares. "Nevermind."_

_"Xander, the point is you're letting Cody humiliate you. I thought you were done with being her butt monkey."_

_"Yeah, but a bet is a bet. I'm not a welsher."_

_Buffy still looked like she wanted to strangle someone. "Hey, don't be mad at me, Buffy." Xander smiled in an attempt to deflect the anger. "As you said, this is all Cordelia's fault. She bought the costume for me."_

_"You don't have to do this, Xander. You're not a source of entertainment for a bunch of stuck up, fashion-obsessed cretins." Buffy clearly was going to be talking to Cordelia sometime soon about this. For his part, Xander just wished she would leave it alone._

_Buffy put her costume on the counter and paid the man behind the counter. It confused Xander for a moment to realize that the man selling the costumes wasn't the dark haired guy who'd assisted them earlier, but rather a tall balding man in glasses who had a small pile of sliced cheese on his shoulders and on the top of his head._

_"Come on, Buff... I made the bet fair and square, and she's just lucky she's not going to be dressed like a Saudi Arabian elementary-school teacher. I gave my word, so I have to put up with some painful humiliation. It'll pass. It always does."_

_"Why a Saudi Arabian school teacher?" Willow asked. She hopped up on the library counter, picked up one of the books there, and started randomly flipping through it. On the cover was a picture of a man with faces on either sides of his head._

_"Have you seen the costumes she usually wears? Total slut-o-rama." Xander grinned. "I was going to have her cover up from her hair to her toes with only her eyes showing."_

_"That would have been fun to watch. If you won, that is." Willow seemed to sadden. "Its too bad you didn't, because I'm really going to miss you, Xander. Especially around Halloween."_

_"Don't worry, Wills. I'm not really goint anywhere. I'll still be here, because she isn't there anymore. But she soon will be." As he spoke, all the color faded out, like an old movie. Xander's vision faded too, like a picture being projected into too much light. The school library had been replaced by a great empty white space all lit up like the sun._

_At first, Xander thought he was alone, but there were two other people there. One was a muscular woman with blonde hair. The other was a gigantic, swarthy-looking man with two faces on his head. The man said, "Your strength and your weakness are twins in the same womb." He picked Xander up in his left hand, and the woman in his right._

_And then he was falling out of the sky..._

**XxxxxxX**

**Five Months After Impact:**

During the time he started assisting Buffy in her duties as the defender of humanity against the creatures of darkness, Xander Harris had become somewhat of an expert in waking up after mysteriously (and painfully) being rendered unconscious. And there were a few moments when the circumstances under which he'd been knocked out this time were mysterious, as he couldn't really remember them.

So rather than waste any time wondering how it was that he'd been knocked out, he concentrated on the fact that he had a headache roughly the size of a supertanker and painful enough to drop a Tyrannosaurus rex in its tracks. Some vile, cruel person was driving thick, blunt, rusty spikes into his head through his ears. His nose burned with some awful chemical stench. His body felt as if it had been dipped in iron filings and then wrapped in burning sandpaper. In the short moment he opened his eyes, that same mysterious person with the rusty spikes dumped a gallon of hydrochloric acid into them.

The sensory stimulus was overwhelming, frightening, and agonizing, and Xander soon found himself unconscious again.

At first, the second time he regained consciousness, the pain continued. But very gently, a soft voice that wasn't really a voice more than it was just an instinctual set of instructions began telling him how to turn the volume down on everything. First his ears cleared of the endless cacophony around him. Then the horrible combination of odors coming from all around him subsided. The burning sandpaper and iron filings were replaced on his skin by something cool and soft. And lastly, his eyes; they took the most effort, but eventually the light coming through his eyelids no longer burned out his nerves.

Xander immediately called to mind the procedures he'd jokingly labeled the "Unconsciousness Protocols." A set of simple steps devised to figure out where one was when one returned to consciousness, as well as assess any potential threats in the surrounding areas. Step One was pretty easy. He kept his eyes closed while hoping no one noticed you were actually awake while you surreptitiously checked out your surroundings.

It took a moment, because his body felt odd. Like he was off-balance and whirling, despite laying flat still on something that felt suspiciously like a bed. He felt heavy and clumsy; more clumsy than usual. As if his bodily proportions were off. His kinesthetic senses were awry, though Xander would never have been able to describe it in that fashion. Every time he thought he had it licked, the odd feeling would pull his balance off plumb again and he was back at square one. It took him a several minutes to figure out the wheres and whyfores and get used to the odd off-balanced feeling enough for him to continue to step two.

Because Step Two was harder. Step two was actually checking out your surroundings and hopefully determining where you were without letting anyone know you were awake. Xander kept his eyes closed and simply listened for a moment. The noisy hum of the machinery in the room with him, plus the annoying beeps and doops coming from some of them, punched into his awareness and he fought for a moment to concentrate past them.

Almost as quickly as he started concentrating, the hums and beeps faded into the background. He just as quickly picked up the sound of heartbeats. Six of them. Two weren't all that far away. The other four were slightly more distant. They weren't particularly rapid, so he figured the people who owned the heartbeats were calm.

He could hear the muffled sounds of conversation as well; nothing too exciting. Comments about a game, what was going to be had for dinner, how the kids were, and so on.

_Wait just a cotton-picking minute!_ He thought to himself. _How the hell am I hearing heartbeats? What the hell is going on?_

Xander opened his eyes in surprise and was immediately blinded again. It wasn't as bad as before, but it was still a little much. The world was too bright and awash in strange colors and patterns and for a moment Xander was certain he was going crazy. He blinked, trying to figure out exactly what it was he was seeing. All of the electronics in the room were glowing red and white and green all at the same time. There was a silver sleet falling through the ceiling of the room. From the florescent light came a veritable rainbow of colors. He looked to the windows on the wall to the right and the sunlight was breaking apart into a spectrum. More colors than Xander had ever seen were suddenly before his eyes. His eyes, right. He closed them, almost willing everything to return to normal, and when he re-opened his eyes, everything had.

Carefully, he lifted his hands to look at the shackles chaining him to the bed. That they were shackles was obvious enough, despite their high tech look. They surrounded his wrists and moved up his arms almost to his elbows, and had some sort of electronic thingy along the top of his arm. Solid plates of metal a good four inches long, and padded with some soft plastic foam so he could not rub himself raw on them. A pair of dull silvered cables led from the shackles to a point under the bed. And a row of small green lights followed the curve of his wrist. As he moved his hands, a few of the green lights flickered red for a moment before settling back to green.

Noticing these lights made him notice his wrists and hands. They seemed off to him, being both more slender and more muscular than his regular wrists and hands, all at the same time. They weren't his hands; it was as simple as that. The idea that he had someone else's hands was unsettling. It was a clue that something really, really bizarre was going on.

He felt the weight of some other piece of equipment around his neck. He couldn't quite bring his hand up to touch the whatever-it-was. But it didn't hinder the movement of his head much, and it wasn't choking him. So while it bothered him - almost frightened him, if he was honest with himself - he decided that there wasn't much he could do about it just right then.

Unbelieveably, it was only then that Xander noticed that he had breasts.

He had breasts.

They were definitively female-style human boobs.

These weren't the sort of thing a guy might develop after sitting around on his couch watching soap operas while eating too many cookies and cheeseburgers.

No, these were the type of thing he pictured whenever he used to go looking for his Dad's skin magazines. They were the entire point of eating shitty, overcooked and underseasoned wings at Hooters. They were the reason to sneak out in the middle of the night and watch HBO.

_Breasts. Tits. Boobs. Bazooms. Melons. Wahwahs. Sweater puppies. Tatas. Knockers. Chesticles. Funbags. Jugs. Hooters. Funpillows. Honkers. Hooters. Gazongas._

They were there.

He had them.

They actually felt like they were physically attached to his chest and everything.

At first, it didn't connect. It didn't connect at all.

He poked the boob on the left with a finger, causing it to dimple in slightly under the pressure of his finger. It resumed its natural shape when he removed his finger. It had been soft, and pliable and squishy, and it pretty much felt just like he always imagined a boob would feel, during those days when he when he daydreamed about getting a chance to feel a girl's boobs.

It still hadn't connected. It hadn't connected at all.

_Huh. Wow. Where did these come from?_ He asked himself that question five times.

Awkwardly, because his arms were still chained to his bed, Xander reached up and pulled the neck of the hospital gown someone had dressed him in away and peeked, sort of sideways, at his breasts. They were a milky shade of cream that matched the rest of his skin, with wide, pale pink aureolas and small nipples that reminded him of pencil erasers. They were, in his opinion, pretty damned impressive.

Still no connection.

He slid his hand up and over the one on the right (and somewhere inside his head, there arose the secret fear that the girl who these were attached to was about to slap him for his brazen attempt at feeling her up).

His hand came to rest over the right breast. He cupped it gently, not sure how to proceed, and gave it a little squeeze. He was surprised at how enjoyable the sensation of his own hand on the breast was. Not just from his hand, but from the breast.

It surprised him for a moment that he could feel the pressure of his hand on the breast, just as he could feel the breast in his hand. He wasn't sure whose breasts these were, but they were real. And really real, not just pretend real. These were real boobs.

Real boobs.

And then it hit him. Xander abruptly bolted upright in his bed, crying out in terror. He couldn't pull his eyes away from these... these... he couldn't force himself to say the word.

_Holy shit! I've got tits! Where the fuck did I get tits!?_ _**How**__ the fuck did I get tits!? I'm a guy! Guys aren't supposed to have fucking tits! Only girls have..._

The thought stopped in his head and his vision went a little gray, like he was staring down a tube. With the same awkward movements that let feel himself up, he moved one of his hands down, under his hospital gown, to the place where his legs met his torso. He was terrified of what he was going to find when his hand reached its destination. And indeed, he found exactly what he was hoping he wouldn't. Or rather, he didn't find what he was hoping he would. Accent on _**DIDN'T**_.

Something that, being a guy, he'd always thought was vastly important was suddenly missing.

Later on, when he was looking back on this situation, Xander Harris could honestly say that his reaction to finding out that he was now physically a girl was entirely justified, natural, and to be expected. He cried out, "I'm a girl!" and had just enough time before he fainted to realize that the voice coming from his mouth was higher and more girly than the one he was used to using.

**XxxxxxX**

**Author's Note**: Xander Harris belongs to Mutant Enemy. Power Girl belongs to Time/Warner. SHIELD, the Avengers, and the rest of the Marvel Universe belongs to Disney (more's the pity). Everything else belongs to me.


	3. Go to Bed Dead And Yet Wake Up Alive

**XxxxxxX**

_"The only way to truly kill freedom is in small, unnoticeable cuts, not huge bleeding wounds." - Justice Felix Frankfurter_

**XxxxxxX**

Not far from the bed in which Xander Harris lay unconscious, Agent Calvin Henry of SHIELD sat a desk, reading a copy of _Field and Stream_ magazine. The cover article was entitled "Dove Hunting Etiquette". Agent Henry had never been dove hunting. He'd hunted deer since he his father first took him that winter of his 15th year. He'd also gone on a bear hunt once. But never dove hunting. He couldn't imagine that it would be any more exciting than a bear hunt, but it did look like it had its own challenges, what with doves being small and fast-moving. Birds that were hard to shoot sounded like fun.

He wasn't technically supposed to be reading on the job, but absolutely no one with any sort of authority really cared. Over the course of who knew how many shifts, Agent Henry had discovered that the primary feature of this particular job was boredom. The girl he and the rest of his team were guarding had been out cold for nearly six months. Agent Henry was willing to put real money on her ending up a vegetable, if it wouldn't have got earned him a serious reprimand. It wasn't that he was mean-spirited or callous; its just that like a lot of veteran law enforcement officers, he was very much jaded and cynical.

And a reprimand was the last thing he needed. He liked his job; he certainly enjoyed it more than he liked his short tenure with the FBI. He was smart enough to know that pulling something as monumentally stupid as laying a bet that a hospital patient would end up being permanently brain damaged or something was the kind of shit that got you dismissed on ethnics charges, or worse. Or worse, got you not only fired but prosecuted, like that dumb bastard Lawery, who had snuck into the girl's room, took a bunch of pictures of her lying there all naked, and then tried to sell them to a porn website.

Moron. Lawery had apparently missed the memo that the girl was jail-bait, and nothing ends a life like a conviction for manufacturing kiddie porn. Lawery had ended up with a well-deserved one-way ticket to a twenty-five year vacation in Leavenworth.

When he began this assignment, he'd idly wondered who the girl was. He'd been able to find out her name, some basic biographical info, and her exact status ("temporary medical custody pending further determination", whatever the heck that meant), but everything else about the girl was being restricted. He'd found out through scuttlebutt that she was some new and unknown superhuman, and that apparently her skin was impenetrable, but that was it.

He'd also heard from Carol Dunleavy, the agent who'd accompanied Assistant Supervising Agent Copella to the girl's home in Ohio, that when they were informed that the girl had been found, her parents had wigged out. Her mother started crying, and her father had told Copella and Dunleavy that the girl was "no longer welcome" at the family farm.

Agent Henry thought that was a little sad. He'd lost both his folks in a plane crash when he was not too much older than the girl. That was bad enough, having your folks taken away like that. But being told that she no longer had a home and her folks didn't want her.

Maybe it would be better for her if she didn't wake up.

He continued reading his magazine in silence. The article about hunting doves had turned into an article about the comparative value of crossbows. He'd never used a crossbow when hunting, and the article actually interested him. He was so involved in the article that when the monitoring system at his desk started beeping, the noise surprised Agent Henry so much that he dropped his magazine.

He sat there in shock for several seconds. The alarm hadn't ever gone off after it was tested, way back when the girl was first brought in. He mastered his surprise and carefully studied the video monitor. It was a live feed, so if there was anything going on in the room...

_There. Did she just move? Was she... did she look like she was in a different position than usual?_

Agent Henry leaned forward and pressed a button, speaking into the microphone on the desk. "Medical team to room 308, please. Security team to room 308 please. Doctor Darby, your patient is awake." He pressed an additional button and said, "Agent Dunne, check your primary, would you? We just had something register on her restraints and it looks like she's moved. Might be nothing, but take a look, okay?"

"Roger, Calvin." Dunne responded over her radio. "Did you say it looked like she has moved? Coma patients don't move around like people who are asleep. You sure?"

"Positive. She's in a different position. Gather up the doctor; he's going to want to check her over before you do your initial interview."

Agent Henry waited until he got confirmation from Agent Dunne, the senior member of the security team assigned to watch over the girl. And then he went back to his reading. He was definitely going to try to talk his wife into going dove-hunting with him. She might complain at first, but he remembered that, way back when he took her fishing for marlin that one time, she eventually started having fun with it and later actually got enthused. The same thing would likely happen again this time.

**XxxxxxX**

Waking up the second time was much, much more abrupt for Xander than the first time had been. Despite the utter chaos of sensory overload and the heavy weight of suddenly being awake after months in a coma, the first time Xander woke up, he'd slid into a sort of easy, slow wakefulness. He'd awakened a step at a time, in quick succession to be sure, but it had still been a step at a time.

The second time he awoke, maybe four minutes later, was as sudden and jarring as a car crash. His senses were haywire again, though somehow it wasn't as intrusive as before. He found it much easier to listen to the little voice in the back of his head that told him how to turn the volume down on everything. But it was still as if someone opened his head and poured a bucket of ice water into it.

There were people in the room with him; five of them. Without ever opening his eyes, he knew this. He could hear their heartbeats, and smell the faint acrid odor of their sweat, and feel the slight increase in air temperature that each one of them was causing as infrared radiation poured into the atmosphere from their bodies. He could even tell that two of them were closer to him than the others, and that one was close enough to reach out and touch.

The five other people in the room were the first thing that he noticed, though they weren't what consumed the whole of his attention. What consumed his attention, at least at first, was the fact that he was still apparently a girl. He still had a pair of boobs, big ones; his chest felt odd, heavier, unwieldy because of them. Is this how girl's felt all the time? And his... his... he couldn't say it. Not even to himself. He couldn't even force himself to use one of the dozens of childish euphemisms he and Jesse had carefully memorized while they were growing up together. The terms just would not enter his conscious mind. But even so, it wasn't there. Still. That entire part of his body felt weird. Certain sensations that he knew he should be feeling weren't being felt because..._ that_... was missing.

For some reason, it embarrassed him. Internally, in his head, where his mind lived, he was a guy. He knew he was a guy. It was one of the unchangeable laws of the universe. Alexander Lavelle Harris. Guy. A man among men. He loved sports and looking at women and drinking beer and spitting and scratching himself in public and burping!

_Well..._

_Actually..._

If he were to be truthful, he didn't mind participating in the occasional touch-football game, and he wasn't a half-bad swimmer, but most other sports left him cold. The most beer he'd ever had in his life was when his alcoholic father Tony pushed an open can into his hands and said, "Every kid needs to have a sip when they get to be eight." He hadn't liked it much, and living with Tony the Lush he was fairly comfortable with the idea of never drinking again. Burping and spitting and scratching, as any guy could tell you, just weren't the thrills that they were made out to be.

On the other hand, when it came to the ladies...

_Well..._

He couldn't deny he liked to look at them but lately he'd come to the conclusion that merely being pretty wasn't enough for him. Harmony Kendall had been proof of that. Very pretty girl; complete and total bitch. No thanks.

The fact that he was failing the guy test further embarrassed him.

So yeah. Internally, he was still a guy. Externally he felt like... he felt like. Well? He didn't know what he felt like because it all felt weird. He supposed this was what girls felt like. No, that thought was suddenly running into bad directions. And he knew that he didn't want to feel his outs... no, stop. That wasn't any better. Okay. So. He was a girl, and it was weird, and he didn't know how to feel girls. No. Stop.

Embarrassed by his own embarrassment, he slowly opened his eyes.

The five people turned out to be four women and a man. Three of the women were dressed in what Xander was assuming were nearly identical dark-colored; they all had similar insignia and patches, hence uniforms. Of the man and the last woman, he was wearing a white lab coat over his shirt and tie, while she was wearing one of those merrily multicolored smocks Xander had come to associate with nurses.

The doctor was leaning over him. One of the man's hands was reaching toward Xander's face, while the other held some sort of short metal wand. Xander pulled back as far as he possibly could; he wasn't so much surprised by the man's presence as he was by the man's actions. The doctor reaching for his face scared him a moment. Obligingly, though, the doctor stepped back a pace and smiled. _Nice, pleasant doctor's smile,_ Xander thought to himself. _Designed to keep the patient calm and cooperative._ It was, in Xander's opinion, a smile engineered to make a patient feel relieved.

Of course, the three imposing, scary people who were so obviously some sort of military standing by the door killed whatever relief Xander might be feeling at a friendly doctor's smile. They were each watching Xander like hawks, and each wore some fancy-looking high-tech pistol on their hips. The guns alone were proving to be the opposite of "relieving."

"Ah, and there you are. You're awake! That's great!" The doctor spoke using that assured-yet-kindly doctor's tone, again engineered to make a patient feel perfectly at ease. It was likely the same tone of voice the doctor used to tell cancer patients they only had a day and a half to live or something.

"Uh, ri'wake." Xander tried to force himself to relax, but again the ladies near the door with the honking big guns were a bit unnerving. His voice was a scratchy croak...

And it...

It was weird!

"wake..." He tried again. It was difficult getting his mouth to work. He obviously had been out for a while.

Was that his voice? How could that be his voice? He'd never had the absolute deepest of voices, but his speaking voice certainly wasn't made of the higher-pitched sounds he was creating now. Xander, of course, had no idea what a tenor or a mezzo-soprano was, but if he did, he'd certainly have pointed out that he normally was the first, and not the second.

"Okay, good to know." The doctor gave the 'nothing to worry about' smile again, and it broke Xander out of his musings about his voice. "My name is Mark Darby. I'm one of the doctors here, and I've been supervising your care. This is Susan." The doctor indicated the woman wearing the multicolored smock. "She's been your long-term-care nurse."

"Long term care?" Xander asked. It still came out a little croak-like. His confusion at the situation was apparent and tangible.

The reassuring smile faded a bit. "Um... yes. You've been with us since October. You've been in a coma. I take it you don't remember how you got here?" When Xander indicated that he didn't with a shake of his head, the doctor glanced at the nurse, who scribbled something down on the thing in her hands.

"You may find that your throat is too dry and scratchy to talk very well, so do your best. And if you need a drink of water, we can get you some." The doctor sort of shrugged in the direction of a thin, strip-like rolling table that held, among other things, a bedpan, a water pitcher, and a short stack of clear plastic cups.

The doctor held up the small wand-like object he had in his hands. Xander could see it was just a fancy-looking penlight. "I need to check your pupil response and a couple of other things, if that's okay. None of this will hurt, I assure you. And while I'm doing this, Susan is going to ask you a couple of questions, just to make sure you're okay and you're not suffering any problems from being unconscious for so long. Okay?" The man smelled of cigarettes, lots of them. Almost like he'd bathed in cigarette smoke before coming in. The smell almost made Xander vomit, but within moments it was gone.

Xander just nodded and held his head still while the doctor repeatedly shined a light in first one eye, then the other. He'd noticed that no one had answered his question, but for a moment he was too busy looking at the device the nurse was working with. It reminded him of one of those data pads used by the crew of the Enterprise on _Star Trek: The Next Generation. _He knew that the presence of this real-life datapad should have clued him in to something, but at the moment all he could think about was how cool the thing was.

"Can you tell me your name, sweetie?" Nurse Susan smiled at Xander as she asked.

"Zahn-" Xander croaked. Without thinking he pulled one of his hands up toward his throat, only for the hand to come to a sudden and abrupt stop because of the shackle. He looked at the shackles in disgust, then turned that same exasperated look toward the guards near the door. The guards, for their part, didn't so much as react.

"Oh. Sorry about that. Let me get you some water." The nurse, Susan, poured some ice water into one of the cups, then popped a bendy straw into it. "There you go." The nurse seemed nice enough, but Xander could smell the tuna that the woman had eaten recently. Obviously the nurse hadn't had a chance to brush her teeth after she ate. The stench of the fish almost made Xander recoil, but within moments it had faded into the background.

"Okay." The nurse put the cup of water back on the table. "Let's try that again. Can you tell me your name?"

"Xander Harris." Xander's voice was still a bit on the croaky side, but it was at last working. He coughed lightly from the sensation. It was like he really needed to clear his throat, but there was nothing in the way of it being clear. And it was still freaky to hear that voice come out of his throat. He just wasn't supposed to sound that way.

"I'm sorry, did you say, 'Zander'?"

Xander nodded. "Its a nickname. Its actually 'Alexander', but all my friends call me Xander." He coughed again, then finished. "No one but my folks call me Alexander."

"We'll talk about that in a minute honey." The nurse looked at her _Star Trek_ pad, then at the Doctor. "Did you say that your name is 'Alexander?' Like the boy's name?"

"Well yeah 'like the boy's name.' What do you expect?" Xander raised his hands as high as he could, then dropped them back onto his lap. This promptly reminded him of why they might question is use of a boy's name. _Oh. Yeah. That. To them, I'm just some girl._

"Okay. Alexander, then. And you say your friends call you Xander. That's interesting. I would have thought it would be 'Alex', right?" Nurse Susan smiled. "What do I know? Okay, Xander... can I call you Xander?" At Xander's nod, she continued. "Okay, Xander, do you have a middle name?"

That caused Xander to gloom up. "Yes, I have a middle name." He didn't say anything else.

"I'm going to lower your head, okay?" The doctor asked, just before lowering Xander's head. That was one of his pet peeves: people who asked you if it was okay to do something and then just did it without waiting for you to give your permission. "Now, um, Xander, I need to listen to your chest, so I'm going to pull your gown down just a little. Don't worry, I'm not going to uncover you or anything."

The doctor moved Xander's hospital gown out of the way, just enough like he said he would, and then started using his stethoscope to listen. It hadn't occurred to Xander to worry about having his chest exposed to the air before. It took him a moment to realize that suddenly having boobs would mean that people treated him like he had boobs. _How long is this freak-show going to last?_ He asked himself.

The nurse had waited until the doctor had started listening when she prompted Xander. "You say you do have a middle name?"

"Yes." Xander just nodded, once.

The nurse looked at him, expectantly. After a short staring contest, Xander finally conceded the fight. "Fine. Its Lavelle. It was my mother's maiden name. Could I have another sip of water?"

The nurse complied, and while Xander was drinking she asked her next question. "How old are you Xander?"

"Seventeen. I'll be eighteen in January."

"Oh yeah? My birthday is in January. I'm the twenty-seventh. How about you?" The nurse smiled at him, still scribbling on her datapad.

"The twelfth."

Nurse Susan gave Xander another smile. "Okay, Xander. Can you tell me where you're from? What town you were born in?"

"I'm from California. Sunnydale. Sunnydale, California. On the coast, about an hour northwest of LA."

The doctor stopped poking and prodding. "Okay, well, I'm done. It looks like you're okay. I'd advise taking it easy when they finally let you get up and walk around. You're out of practice, so you might be wobbly." He took the datapad from the nurse and tapped on it in several places, then began scribbling himself. After a moment, he handed it back, then turned to Xander.

"Well, uh, _Xander_," To Xander it seemed the doctor was putting special emphasis on his name. "Its been nice talking to you. I'll be around to check on you and to keep you updated on your condition. In the mean time, Susan here will be taking care of you. I'll talk to you later!" With that, he nodded to the nurse and the guards, then left.

Xander heard the buzz-click of the door. He was locked in, and everyone in the room was locked in with him. Nurse Susan and the guards had followed the doctor out with their eyes, just as Xander had. When they all turned back to him, Xander interrupted by asking, "Hey, when we're done, do you think I can give my friends a call and maybe my folks? Let them know I'm still alive? When you tell my folks I'm okay, they'll probably ask you how much you want to keep me, but my friends will want to know I'm doing good."

"Well, I know that someone's talked to your parents about your being here. I don't know if they've been told you're awake yet." Nurse Susan patted him on the arm. Xander barely felt it, and it came off as a bit fake. "Okay, Xander, these next couple are going to sound a bit weird, but its all just a preliminary to make sure there's no long-term effects of being unconscious for so long."

"You know, the doctor said that too. How long have I been here? And what happened to me?" That was the big question. How the hell did he suddenly become a girl? The last thing he remembered was Halloween and trick-or-treating, and then everything because gray and foggy, and then everything became black.

Nurse Susan suddenly looked out of her element. "You, uh, don't remember what happened? They found you in a crater in Nevada. You were naked as the day you were born and out like a light. And you've been out since then."

"No, I don't remember any of that. So when is now?"

"Oh, sorry." Nurse Susan cut a quick glance at the guard. Xander saw one of the women give a micro-shrug, at which point Susan tapped something on her datapad. "Well, according to this, you were admitted on the third of November, and its now it the end of March, so just under six months."

"Six months? Holy crow!"

"Yep. Its a long time. So... are you ready for the next round of questions?" At Xander's confirming nod, Susan asked, "How many fingers?" She held her hand up.

"Four. Or three and a thumb if you want to get anal."

"Very good. Okay, and what's the primary color of my smock?" She was scribbling again.

"Purple. Sort of violety purple, too."

"Good. Good. Can you name the current president?"

Xander began to answer, and then abruptly closed his mouth. "Well, given the election and all, I, uh, I don't know. Either President Clinton got re-elected, or its President Bob Dole. One of the two, obviously."

Nurse Susan paused in her scribbling. She looked at Xander a little sharply, then took a deep breath and kept smiling. "Well, I'm not sure where your particular political ideals are located on the left-right scale, but President Clinton was, in fact, re-elected."

"Oh, that's cool. I like the guy. Couldn't have voted for him, but hey, still like the guy."

"Right." Susan glanced at her pad again. "So can you tell me your parents names?"

"Anthony and Jessica." Xander's face got gloomy. "The lush and the punching bag," he muttered to himself.

"I'm sorry, but did you just say, 'the lush and the punching bag?' Was that comment about your parents?"

Xander didn't answer at first. Finally, just when Susan was about to prompt him again, Xander responded. "Yeah. My dad and mom. They're both just... just... exquisite specimens of humanity. He's been living in a bottle ever since he got hurt on the job, and he takes his frustrations out on his family. In return, my Mom's climbed into the bottle right next to him, and has discovered that she knows how to throw a punch too."

That stopped the nurse cold. "Alex, did they ever hurt you? I mean, were you... did they beat you? Did your father ever touch you?" Without meaning to, Nurse Susan's eyes darted down toward Xander's chest, then back up. "You know. Did he ever..."

Xander felt himself blush. His face went from glum to confused to disgusted. "Ugh! Why'd you have to make with the bad thoughts? Oh my God, I'm going to be all day scrubbing with brain bleach to get that picture out of my head! No! He never touched me! Neither did she! I mean, other than with his fists. But not that... he got really liquored up one time and threw an empty bottle of Jim Beam at my head, but he never. Ewww!" The long rant got scratchier and scratchier, and quieter and quieter, as Xander's voice gave out.

Nurse Susan helpfully brought more ice water. "I think we're done for now," she added. "The remote for the TV is over your right shoulder; let me get that for you. I know you can't get it with your hands in those things." Susan actually looked apologetic at her own mention of the shackles, as she handed the remote to Xander. It was attached to the wall by a long silvery cable. "Agent Dunne is going to want to talk to you about a couple of things, I am sure." Nurse Nancy tilted her head toward one of the guards. "Keep smiling, Xander. Don't let it get to you."

With that, she patted Xander on the hand and left, accompanied by the usual buzz-click.

Xander watched her leave, then turned her attention to the woman Nurse Nancy had called 'Agent Dunne.' Xander studied her for a moment. Really studied her. This Agent Dunne was maybe ten or twelve years older than Xander. She was a tallish woman, standing maybe five-foot ten inches tall. Her hair was auburn and tucked up into that sort of twirly-bun thing that women know how to do when they have long hair. And she had freckles.

If Xander hadn't been absolutely terrified of her, he'd have thought she was cute.

He fell back on his usual behavior patterns: when scared beyond belief, start making jokes. "So, Agent Dunne, right? I have to say that as vacation resorts go, the beds here are pretty great, but the room service is a bit on the light side." The corners of Dunne's mouth quirked just enough for Xander to be aware of it. He swallowed heavily and continued, unsure exactly how to proceed. "So... I guess if Nurse Susan was the good cop, that makes you the bad cop?"

The agent stepped forward as she spoke. "That all depends on how this conversation goes. As you heard, my name is Josephine Dunne. You can call me Ms. Dunne, or Agent Dunne. Eventually, maybe, if everything goes well between us, we can advance to the point that you can call me Josephine, or Jo. But we're not there yet. Would you prefer me to call you Ms. Starr, or Ms. Harris?"

Xander's brow furrowed. "Harris. My last name is Harris. I don't know why you'd want to call me Starr. Its not my name. I don't know anyone named Starr. My name is Alexander Harris. And if you have to call me by my last name its 'Mister' Harris.'" He paused and looked down on himself. "Despite what it looks like, I'm not a girl. I'm a guy. Like I said, my name is Alexander Harris. My friends call me Xander. I don't know how I got stuck in this body, but given some of the other things that have happened to me, this is just... I dunno... weird. But I'm not a girl. I'm not."

Dunne stared at him for a moment. "All evidence to the contrary."

"Yeah! Exactly!" Xander nodded. "This isn't my body and I don't know how this happened, but this isn't me." He waved his hands toward his now-protuberant chest. "It isn't me."

Dunne was quiet for a moment, then began again, this time with a much more stern tone of voice. "Ms. Harris..." She held up a hand when Xander started to object. "Look, I do not want to come across as insensitive, but here's the situation. While you were unconscious we took your fingerprints in an effort to identify you. And identify you we did. We found out that you are, in fact, a seventeen year old female runaway Midvale, Ohio named Karen Starr. In my line of work, I've encountered people who wanted me to call them all sorts of things," she continued. "So while I'm willing to go with the flow and call you by whatever name you want me to call you while you're here, there are limits. I'm not going to call you 'Mister' just because you want to show your ass."

"Look, lady..."

"Agent." There was iron in her voice now. "Call me Agent Dunne, or Ms. Dunne. Do not call me lady. That is disrespectful. I haven't been disrespectful to you, so you have no call to be disrespectful to me."

Xander took a deep breath, then let it out through his nose slowly. "Okay. Agent. Look, I'm not just saying this to show my ass. I really am a guy. I'm just... stuck in a girl suit."

"You're saying you're a transsexual?"

"A what?" Xander was confused for a moment. "Oh, you mean... no, I'm... well... sort of, I guess... I mean... but... I mean... I'm a guy, and I'm trapped inside the body of a girl, but I have no idea how I got here. I wasn't born this way. I mean I wasn't born a girl, I was born a guy. And then this all happened. One minute I was a guy, the next I'm suddenly a girl."

"So you're not a transsexual, you've just been suddenly turned female." Dunne asked with a bemused look on her face. "Like someone hit you with a sex-change ray and turned you from a man into a woman?"

"Exactly! Right! That's what happened! I need to figure out how to change back. There's got to be a way. I mean, if something turned me into _this_." Dunne's face grew darker and Xander realized he'd just referred to being female in a very disrespectful manner. "Sorry... I'm sure there's nothing wrong with being female, but when you're a guy its not what you're supposed to be and I'm not describing it correctly and oh my God, I'm babbling like Willow." He took a deep breath and again let it out slowly. "Anyway, I'm stuck in this body... not that there's anything wrong with it, I guess, but its _not my body_. I want to get my body back, and until I do, I'm asking you to refer to me as 'mister.' I didn't ask for this, so... its not my fault I'm not in my correct body. Okay?"

Dunne was quiet, an odd look on her face.

"I promise I'll be cooperative. Just... if you're going to call me by my last name, do me this one favor, okay?" Xander was pleading. He knew how desperate he sounded.

"All right. For the sake of mutual cooperation, we'll call you 'mister.' Don't jump on people who forget, okay?"

Xander nodded quickly, relieved to get that over with. "So... you were saying?"

"What?" Dunne gave a start, then looked apologetic. "Oh, sorry. I was saying that I'm the head of your security detail." She stopped, abruptly, and restarted. "I understand this isn't exactly the best circumstances in which to meet new people, and I'm sorry about that. I'm not exactly at fault for what's going on either."

To Xander she at least sounded sincere.

"Now, that being said, I am required by law to give you the following information. If it sounds like something I memorized, its because I had to memorize it." Dunne smiled slightly, then began: "In accordance with Part 5 of the United States Legal Code, Section 102 Subsection 1103, and Section 105, Subsection 2105, you have been arrested by SHIELD on the charge of publicly utilizing superhuman powers without due registration and without proper licensing."

Xander started to speak, but Dunne held her hand up. "I'll answer your questions after I finish, okay?"

"As an unregistered superhuman, you can be held indefinitely as a threat to the American public, and will not receive the benefit of a trial, or even legal representation." This caused Xander to scowl; Dunne acknowledged his scowl with an apologetic shrug. "That all said, you're being given a chance to cooperate with us, and a chance to register. Should you choose to not cooperate, you'll be sent to prison, probably for the rest of your life. Now... you obviously have questions. I'll answer what I can. There are some things I either can't answer, and by that I mean literally I don't have the information so I can't answer, and then there are things I won't answer because of security concerns or security classification. But as long as you remember those restrictions, I'll try to answer your questions."

"Yeah. My first question was originally going to be about who you guys were and the superhuman thing, but now I have a question about the entire 'no trial, rest of my life' thing. I thought the Constitution was set up to prevent that sort of thing! Isn't there an Amendment that prevents cruel and unusual punishments and gives everyone whatcha callit... due process? I'm not a lawyer but I've watched enough Law and Order to know that just tossing people into jail for life without so much as a lawyer visit is wrong!"

"Except you're not considered a person."

That stopped Xander cold. And the cold went all the way through him. "Then what am I?"

"Legally? You're a walking talking weapon of mass destruction, and in the interest of public safety, you can and will be imprisoned if you don't cooperate." Again, Dunne sounded apologetic, but she also sounded determined.

Xander thought about it. "And what makes me a weapon of mass destruction? I'm just a guy who got turned into a girl."

"No, Mr. Harris," she sighed. "If, as you say, you're just a guy who got turned into a girl, you're also a guy who fell from near-Earth orbit, slammed into the side of a mountain hard enough to leave a crater a hundred feet across, and yet doesn't have a scratch on her. Him. Sorry."

"What?"

"While you've been unconscious, we've been examining you. While we do not know the full extent of your abilities, we have pretty well determined that you're immune to any sort of... well... damage isn't the word for it. We tried to set you up with an IV, and the needles broke and bent on your skin. We can't get any sort of read on your body's electrical system. To an X-Ray machine, you're solid as concrete. We get some penetration with an MRI, but not enough to really matter."

The shock was apparent on Xander's face. He had no idea how to react to this. It was... it was... it was almost as shocking as waking up a girl. _Congratulations, Xander... you're a superhero! And because of it, you're going to jail!_

"I don't know if you're a mutant or if you got hit by lightning, or were dunked in a vat of toxic waste or, picked up the wrong magical doo-dad at the wrong time. But I do know my superhumans, Mr. Harris, and you are certainly one of them."

"Wait. You said, 'You know your superhumans?' So I'm not the only one?"

"Not the only... Mr. Harris, are you really trying to tell me that you've never heard of the Avengers? Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Wasp? Or Spider-Man? That you've never seen a news story about any of these people?" Dunne was obviously skeptical.

"Captain... Huh?" Again shock prevented Xander from articulating what he was feeling. He thought about what he was hearing, and as he did something from what Dunne had said finally trickled through. "Wait... you said I was in SHIELD custody earlier? You're talking SHIELD the agency. Agent Dunne. You're a SHIELD agent. Like _Nick Fury and the Agents of Shield_, SHIELD. That's who you're talking about, right? That SHIELD?"

"Director Fury is retired, but yes, that would be the agency I'm talking about. But..."

"And Captain America and Spider-Man and the Avengers and the X-Men and Doctor Strange... all that... they're all real?"

"Yes, of course they are. Why would you not think they were real?"

Xander seemed to deflate in his bed. "Holy shit, its worse than I thought. I'm like... in another world entirely." His words were barely audible.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"I'm... I... I don't even know how to describe it. I'm in the Marvel Universe, stuck in a girl's body."

Dunne just looked confused. "What's the Marvel Universe?"

"Yeah, I guess you'd just call it 'the universe.'" Xander said. He couldn't prevent the wry smile. "I was always a bigger fan of DC Comics than Marvel."

"Mr. Harris, you're not making sense."

"Yeah, I know." He shook his head. "But its not me. The world isn't making sense, Agent Dunne of SHIELD. The world isn't making sense."

She was silent for a moment, then asked, "Tell me about it. Please?"

Xander stared at her for a good long while, then finally shrugged. "Okay. The last thing I remember is being in Sunnydale, trick-or-treating. I was helping to escort some elementary school kids as part of a Community Action thing set up by my High School principal, a real sourpuss of a man named Ryan Snyder. We kept the kids safe while they were walking around at night."

"That was sweet of you. Did you have fun?"

"Oh sure, I was sharing _Xander's Tips for Maximizing Candy Acquisition_ with the runts. And then suddenly everything went gray, then black, and the next thing I know I'm waking up here. And I'm stuck in a girl's body, and am apparently about to be thrown in prison for the crime of being alive." Xander's eyes looked through Agent Dunne. "Before I got here I was a man, and I didn't have these powers. I don't know what's going on, and I have no idea what to do about it. And my head hurts now."

Dunne turned to one of her subordinates. "Agent Plato, would you go get Mr. Harris something for his headache? I'm sure Agent Book and I will be fine alone with her. Him. With Mr. Harris." At this, one of the other women nodded, then left the room.

"This is like... a bad joke. Why am I the universe's butt-monkey, what with the Aztec mummies and the virgin-eating praying mantises, and the..." his voice trailed off. "I'm really tired. Can we do this some other time?"

Dunne didn't respond.

"Please?" Xander pleaded.

Finally, Dunne nodded. "Okay, we can finish the briefing after you've rested. Keep this in mind, okay? Like I said before, because of your situation, your exact status is a bit up in the air. Right now, its been decided that if, while you're with us, you cooperate, answer our questions, take some tests, and things like that, and if you agree to come into compliance with the Registration Act, you'll eventually be able to go home."

"Home. Right." Xander couldn't help but laugh. "Home seems like its really far away right now."

"I can understand that." Dunne just nodded. Again, she sounded sincere, and apologetic. "So, Mr. Harris... think you can be cooperative with us?"

"What choice do I have?" was the bitter reply.

**XxxxxxX**

From the other side of the one-way glass, Agents Understone and Copella watched Agent Dunne talk to the girl. Both had incredulous looks on their faces.

"Got to admit, Boss, I sort of expected her to lie to us about things, but not to tell this sort of whopper." Copella shook his head. "And such a blatant lie, too. Wow. Its like she doesn't respect us enough to put work into it."

But Understone was shaking his head. "No, I don't think so, Bart. I think the girl actually believes everything she told us. Look at her. She's scared, and shocked, and traumatized, and... well, don't know what else, but I can tell she was earnest about it. I'm not saying she's not nuttier than a fruitcake, but I don't think she's lying."

Copella tapped on the datapad in his hands. "Yeah, well, I got news, Boss. She's lying about this." He handed the datapad to his supervisor. "Take a look."

Understone recognized the Internet Film Repository, or "IFR" as it was called. The website was a database of movie information since the silent era, including just about everyone who'd ever starred in anything, or directed anything, or wrote, produced, did music for, did animation for any film and TV project ever produced. He'd wasted some time there before, just bouncing from one movie page to the next. If you were into movie and TV trivia, and he was, it was a cool site to go to.

The specific page was for the series _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_. Understone remembered it, barely. It had always seemed like a 'chick show' during a time in his life when he was much more into cars and football. As far as he could remember, the only episode of _Buffy_ he ever saw was the one that involved the girl finding the dead body of her mother on the couch, and even then he'd only watched the first ten or fifteen minutes before turning it over to a baseball game.

"Okay, so _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_. What's the connection?" Understone tried to give Copella back the pad, but Copella just pointed to it.

"Look at the cast."

Undertone did so. "Charisma Carpenter as Buffy, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Cordelia, Riff Regan, Anthony Head, Nathan Fillion, Ryan Reynolds... Wait..." He looked at Copella sharply. "_Ryan Reynolds_ as Xander Harris? Let me guess, Xander is short for Alexander, and the character's middle name was Lavelle?"

Copella was nodding. "Exactly, boss. Our girl there is using the name of a TV character." He turned back to the window. "Wonder why she chose that TV character."

Understone shrugged. "No idea. But I still don't think she's lying. Somehow, I think she actually believes she's really this character." He paused, thinking. "Okay, how's this sound? Troubled girl goes through a power eruption and suffers a mental breakdown because of the stress. Takes on the identity of a character from a TV show because being herself hurts to much. Or something."

"Well, its probably way wrong, but it sounds good." Copella gave his boss a sharp look. "You're saying she's not lying because she's crazy?"

"Might be. Never been through it myself, but I've heard that suddenly getting superpowers can be scary and painful. I remember talking to Ms. Marvel once about the time she got her powers. She said she almost got PTSD because of it, and says that its one of the things that caused her to become a drunk. So its possible that happened here. Hell, for all we know, the individual we have here and are calling Karen Starr really is a guy, and part of her eruption was to suddenly become a girl who really existed. Maybe this 'Xander Harris' is a ghost who is possessing Karen Starr. Stranger things have happened."

Copella didn't know how to react to that idea. He was a religious man, and had always had trouble coming to terms with the fact that magic and demons and witches and wizards were real. "Wow. Okay, you want I should contact Leonard Samson?"

"Yeah, Bart. Good thinking. Get Samson. Have him do a psych eval so we know if this girl is a psycho or just a victim. If she's crazy, maybe I won't have to have her hauled to the Gulag, assuming its a permanent thing. If its not, maybe we can do the world some good and get her treatment." Understone turned and walked toward the door.

"Yeah. Lord knows we need more good in the world. I'll handle it, Boss." Copella smiled at his supervisor's retreating back. Still smiling, he turned back to the window to watch Dunne finish up with the girl. Copella let out a sigh. He hated seeing people tossed in jail for doing nothing, and to his mind, all she'd been guilty of was falling out of the sky like a rock. Hopefully someone would smarten back up before it went to far. At least the girl was being cooperative.

**XxxxxxX**

**Author's Note:** If you recognize it, it belongs to either Mutant Enemy, Marvel Comics, or DC Comics. If you don't, its probably mine.

**Author's Note the Second:** So it appears that the _Buffy_ watched in the Marvel Universe wasn't completely identical to that watched in ours. I should note, for those who weren't already aware, that all the alternate casting choices I present here were actual possibilities in our world. Charisma Carpenter and Sarah Michelle Gellar really did exchange roles. Everybody knows about Riff Regan and Nathan Fillion, and Ryan Reynolds really was under consideration to play Xander at one point.


	4. Life is What Happens to You

**Chapter Four: Life is What Happens to You...**

"_Heroes aren't heroes because of what they do. They are heroes because they show all of us that one person, just one person, can make a difference." – Marc Morial_

**XxxxxxX**

"So tell me a little about yourself?"

"You want me to tell you about myself?" Xander stared in bemusement. He knew who Doc Samson was, at least in theory. All his knowledge came from the comics, so it might very well be wrong when applied to a real world. Safer to say he thought he knew who Doc Samson was. Psychiatrist. Superhero. Agent Dunne had said to him that refusing to talk to the doctor would be considered "not cooperating," and that there would be consequences for failing to cooperate. He still wasn't sure what those consequences were, precisely, and their nebulous nature (combined with what he knew about SHIELD's capabilities from the comics) worried him. So he was playing it cool and talking to the shrink. Though calling him "The Shrink" felt odd. Leonard Samson was taller than Xander by a good four inches, and was as wide-of-body as a professional wrestler. And he had green hair. That same bright green you sometimes saw on limes.

"Sure. Just so I can get to know you a little better. But if you're uncomfortable with that, we can talk about something else first." The psychiatrist didn't carry one of those fancy _Star Trek_ pads; just a clipboard with a yellow legal pad on it and a disposable bic pen. For some reason, Xander admired the man for that.

"Right. Tell you about myself." Xander shrugged apathetically. "Okay. Where should I start? I mean, what do you want to know about me?"

"I'd like to know whatever you want to tell me. There's no such thing as a right or wrong answer, here. I'm just here to talk to you."

Xander stared at the ceiling, still wondering where to begin.

"If you can't think of somethign to start with, try starting with your childhood. Most people find that to be a good starting point."

Xander's eyes lowered from the ceiling to Samson. "What?"

The other man laughed. It was a gentle laugh, meant to make him feel more secure, and not meant to put him on guard. "Xander, I've been doing this for a while. I can tell when a person is trying to figure out where they should start talking and is afraid of what they might reveal. Don't worry about it. Don't try to impress me, don't try to hide the painful stuff, don't be afraid of talking about the embarrassing stuff. Just talk. So why don't you start with your childhood? I assure you, once you get going, the easier it will be."

Xander was quiet for a while. Samson looked like he was about to say something else when Xander finally relented. "There's not too much to say about my childhood," he said at last. "I didn't really enjoy most of it. There were some things that were okay, but for the most part it sucked. My life happens to, on occasion, _suck beyond the telling of it_. Sometimes more than I can handle. And my childhood was just the beginning.

"How so?"

"Well, you see..." Xander began, then fell quiet.

"I guess the..." and fell quiet.

"What you have to understand was..." and fell quiet.

"The thing is..." and fell quiet.

"Your childhood was that bad?" Samson finally asked. The doctor leaned forward in the chair, putting his elbows on his knees. "We can talk about something else if you're not ready to talk about it."

"No, its okay. Its just..." And Xander fell quiet again.

Finally, "My parents got married right out of high school. Dad got Mom pregnant and their families sort of forced them together rather than take the easy way out."

"Are you saying that they should have? If your Mom aborted, you wouldn't be here. And if she put you up for adoption, you'd not be the same person you are, so effectively the same thing would be true."

"Yeah, and I guess that's its a good thing I'm here. I mean, yay being me and all that stuff. But I think _they_ would have been happier in the long run without me. Tony, my dad, he was this bigshot high school jock. Captain of Sunnydale High's baseball team. He played third base, and could hit like Mark McGuire. He was expecting to get all sorts of scholarship offers from all kinds of colleges when he got out of school."

"Mom was apparently just some girl he slept with." Xander swallowed hard. "Not a cheerleader or prom queen or anything, and not his regular girlfriend. Just some girl he picked up after a game. And by the time those scholarship offers finally started rolling in, he couldn't take them any more because he had a wife to support with a couple of babies on the way."

"Wait... your file says you are an only child. You said babies?"

Xander became very still and quiet. When he spoke again, his voice was distant and sad. "Once upon a time, I had a twin brother. An identical twin. His name was Gavin, and he disappeared when we were six. I really don't like talking about him."

"What happened to him? I take it he died?"

"God, I hope so..." Xander muttered under his breath.

"What?"

Xander shook, as if coming out of a trance. "Yeah... um... we don't know. He disappeared"

"Disappeared?"

"Yeah. We were playing in our backyard. Just running around playing Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers or some other stupid kids game. Mom was inside, drinking her lunch and watching _Days of Our Lives _or something. I went inside to use the bathroom, and when I got back outside, he was gone. We never saw him again." Again, Samson missed whisper, "Thank God for small favors."

"That's horrible. I'm very sorry." Xander nodded and wiped at his eyes as best he could with his wrists in restraints, but didn't respond. At least not verbally. Samson probed again. "I take it your brother's disappearance made your home life even harder?"

Xander grinned. It was sardonic and hard and torturous. "Yeah, you could say that. Tony didn't want any kids at all, much less two. The colossal prick actually told me once that if there was one good thing about Gavin's disappearance, it was because it was one less pain in his ass he had to deal with. Fucking worthless sack of shit." Xander stopped talking only because he realized he started weeping. He sat there and wiped at his eyes, doing nothing but crying silently and breathing, in and out, as deeply as he could.

"Its okay, Xander." Samson said. "Take your time."

When he could talk again, Xander started right back where he'd left off. "When I was ten, Tony told me that Gavin and I were the reasons he got Mom 'fixed.' That's really how he put it: 'got Mom fixed.' Like she was broken. He decided it was going to happen, and it happened, and Mom had no say in the matter. He apparently saved up a bunch of money so she could get this operation. A tuba-something-or-other. All because of us. Me and Gav. We were to blame for his life being ruined. It wasn't the drinking, or being a miserable fucking bastard. No, it was his kids. We were at fault."

"I take it he regularly made sure you knew you were to blame for his failings?"

"Yeah. On a daily basis. He drank. The man was a drinker. For as long as I can remember, I don't think there was a day that he was entirely sober." Xander shook his head and laughed. "I can't figure how he kept his job, given that he was an angry, sloppy drunk, but he did."

"He was a functional alcoholic?"

""I suppose he was functional. He was never put in jail, never crashed his car, managed to keep his job." Xander rubbed his forehead. This was harder than he thought it would be. "Tony even had friends. The only people he took it out on were Gavin and me and Mom, and then when Gav was gone just me and Mom. I remember the time he met the Mayor of Sunnydale. Dad had won some sort of service award at work and Richard D. Wilkins III himself came down to give him a plaque. And when my friends were around, he was never rough with them or rude... just embarrassing. But the moment it was just the three of us again, he let us know how he really felt about us. Sometimes with words, sometimes with his fists."

"So he was beating both you and your mother?"

"Well... yeah, but not all the time." At that Samson just raised an eyebrow. Xander shrugged. "You know... just every once in a while. Mostly he'd yell. He was a creative man with the insult. I can probably count the times he got violent with me on both hands and have fingers left over, but he was pretty good at letting me and my mom know where we sat. By the time I was ten, I had pretty much been convinced that I was a worthless piece of trash that no one would love."

"How did your mother react to all this?" Samson shifted in his seat, lowering one leg and crossing the other.

"I don't know how she started out, but I always got the impression she originally thought she and Tony would end up happy together. She thought that she'd eventually convince him to love her." Xander shrugged. "I think she started drinking right around the time he started hitting her. By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, she had learned to strike back often and hard. Believe me, the abuse in that family wasn't just in one direction. My mom wouldn't yell at me or dad for doing something wrong... she'd just wade in with her fists. She's hit dad if he didn't take out the trash. She's hit me if I left a used glass on the table. She'd hit both of us when the two of them got into it with each other. I'd even go so far as to say it was mom who was the real abusive parent in my childhood, not my dad."

"You know, Xander, emotional abuse is just as bad and just as damaging as physical abuse."

Again, Xander shrugged. "Yeah, but I'm a guy. We're not trained to think like that, are we?"

Samson's eyebrow flickered at that.

Xander noticed the reaction, but just kept going. "I mean, first, society has trained us that we're not to hit girls, so we let them get away with murder. I've watched the guys around school with their girlfriends, and these girls would badmouth them, and slap them, and push them around, and generally act mean to them, and no one would say a word. But if one of the guys dared push back, even in self defense... if they so much as looked at the girls funny, much less actually hit them, then the entire student body would descend on this 'horrible abuser' before he had a chance to realize what he'd done."

Xander took a deep breath, held it, and let it out slow. "And we're also taught that words can never hurt us."

Samson was quiet for a bit, staring at Xander. "But you don't believe it, do you? All those things that guys are taught about being tough. You don't believe them."

"Not really. I know how hard words can hurt." Without realizing he was doing it, Xander crossed his arms over his chest. It was the classic first defensive position.

**XxxxxxX**

Two days after he'd woken up, they moved Xander to another room. Another cell, really, though it didn't resemble any of the jail cells he'd seen in movies and on television. It was one room with a thickly built metal door, and there was a big mirror on one wall that was actually one-way glass, but the room also had a small table and a chair and a single-sized bed. And there was a TV mounted on the wall and a separate bathroom. So while Xander was sure it was a cell, at least SHIELD had made an effort to give him a little bit of comfort.

At least he wasn't chained to the bed anymore. He could move around the room, and that was a good thing.

Yeah, he could move around his cell but was still living at the beck-and-call of SHIELD. No matter how polite Agent Dunne and her team was, they still weren't letting him out. And that sort of ruined the "good thing" aspects. It was just one more straw on an increasingly tired and pained camel's back. Since the revelatation that he was trapped in a comic book universe, surrounded by people who thought he was some sort of dangerous criminal, separated from his friends, with no idea how to get back to them, not to mention stuck inside a body that not only did not belong to him but was the wrong freaking gender on top of it all, he'd been on the edge of the blackest depression he'd ever experienced or would ever experience.

_HE WASN'T A GIRL, DAMN IT!_

It wasn't like being a girl was a bad thing, per se, but it wasn't him.

He was a guy.

Had been all his life.

For about ten seconds, on first day after he woke up, it had occurred to him that this being female thing would have been slightly smoother had he looked like a female version of himself. He didn't. He looked like Power Girl from the comics. Long, golden blonde hair. Creamy, unblemished skin. A better jawline than his original body. Not to mention the muscles; Power Girl clearly had worked out occasionally. Or maybe she was just normally muscular.

And the tits.

The absolutely huge basketball-sized tits.

He wasn't supposed to have tits.

He wasn't supposed to have a pussy for that matter.

He was supposed to have a dick.

Xander had argued with himself over that word. "Pussy."

He wasn't particularly fond of that word, or using it for that matter, as it always seemed vaguely insulting to him. But what the hell else was he supposed to call that part of the body? Calling it a vagina was just as clinical as calling his dick a penis. When he searched his memory for an appropriate-sounding euphemism, all the ones he could think of were either too ridiculous (seriously, he had no idea where he'd even heard the phrase "sausage wallet" in regards to the female anatomy; probably Jesse), too offensive (he refused to even allow himself to think the "c"-word-rhymes-with-bunt except in generalities), or too vague (what the hell was "oyster cave" even supposed to mean?), so he ended up settling on "pussy."

But that was beside the point. The point, as he reminded himself, was this: he wasn't supposed to fucking have one. And he did. And there didn't seem to be anything he could do about it until he had a chance to consult with Doctor Strange or maybe Agatha Harkness. He'd even be willing to talk to Bardon Mordo. Hell, this was the Marvel Universe, maybe he could find the High Evolutionary. Gender was genetic, right? And the High Evolutionary was some sort of genius when it came to genetics. He wasn't picky. Anyone who could turn him back into his original dick-bearing self would be fine with him.

His first day in the new cell, he'd spent an hour and a half in the bathroom, standing naked in front of the sink, staring at himself. Trying to make sense of the body. This body had become an enemy, or at the very least, a hostile unalligned party who was doing nothing to help him. The center of gravity he was used to was in a completely different spot, so he had to relearn to walk without tipping over. And that wasn't even considering the effects of being in a bed for so long.

So he poked. He prodded. He pushed things around. He pulled on the body's eyelids and stared into the body's eyes., which were a disturbingly light shade of blue. His own eyes were a perfectly serviceable and attractive shade of brown. He examined the body's teeth, which were whiter and straighter than he ever imagined teeth could be. And they were all there. It was obvious that no one had ever tossed a beer bottle at the body's head in anger and broke one of its teeth.

And that was how he tried to think of it. _The_ body. Not _his_ body. He slipped occasionally, but he was actively trying to think of it that way. Because it wasn't his body. It was someone else's body. His body was male. This one was female. Admittedly, it was attractive. In addition to the phenomenal breasts and the creamy, blemish-free skin and the long, luxurious hair and the supermodel-quality face, it was soft. And it reacted in interesting ways during some of his examination of it.

He didn't consider it masturbation, after all, since it wasn't his body he was playing with. More like playing around with a toy. A warm, fleshy, living toy. Though he had enjoyed how it felt.

**XxxxxxX**

"I take it you're speaking from experience." It wasn't really a question, and both Xander and Samson knew it. "Words hurting, I mean."

"Yeah. Loads of experience." Xander sighed. "It wasn't just my dad and my mom. There were some kids I knew growing up..." He stopped in mid-sentence, as if reconsidering. A quiet moment of contemplation, then, "The thing you have to understand about Sunnydale is that its a horrible place to grow up. A horrible place."

"Tell me about it?"

"First off, Sunnydale has like a huge violent crime rate. I mean, not so much on the breaking and entering or drug use, though there's some of that. But people are killed or go missing all the time. The only thing keeping Sunnydale from being the murder capital of the world is that most of the deaths are chalked up to accidents or mysterious circumstances or things that like. But its weird. Its like... its like everyone knows what's going on, but no one ever talks about it. Like everyone in town is sharing a secret."

There was another long bout of silence.

"A secret?" Samson prodded.

"Yeah. Everybody knew that people were dying all around us all the time. They'd take precautions without ever really being aware they were doing it. Like, everybody knew you just didn't go out at night unless it was in a group, and you stayed away from the deserted places even then. Everybody knew you couldn't trust the cops to help you. Everbody knew that when you heard about someone a couple of blocks over just disappearing, if they ever showed back up you stayed away from them like their life depended on it. You didn't invite people in. You didn't stick your neck out unneccesarily." Xander stopped speaking. He just stared at Samson, as if waiting for something.

"All right. So what was going on to make people do all this?"

"Doc, I'd tell you, but you'll think I'm crazy." Xander chuckled. "Crazier, I mean."

"I don't think you're crazy." Samson reassured.

"Sure you do, Doc. You just don't call it crazy." Xander thought about it for a minute. "You know what? Maybe you won't think I'm crazy. After all, you're a psychiatrist who was accidentally irradiated with gamma rays and now can bench press bulldozers. Why would my story be any weirder than that."

"You know about...?" Samson let the question hang in the air.

"Yeah. Um. I read about you. Not too many psychiatrists with lime-green hair, right?"

"Ah. Right. Okay, go on, please. You were going to tell me about what made Sunnydale so dangerous."

"Right." Xander thought for a moment. "Do you know what 'El Broca de Inferno' means?"

Samson's forehead creased as he tried to understand. "Are you trying to say 'La Boca del Infierno', 'the mouth of Hell' in Spanish?"

"Right. 'The Mouth of Hell.' I'm afraid I was never too good at Spanish, and I was barely passing French. By the way, in French its 'La Bouche de l'Enfer.'" With a wry grin, Xander added. "Barely passing is still passing. Sunnydale was sitting on top of the Mouth of Hell. From what Giles told me... he was our librarian... the Hellmouth was like a magical rip in the universe that led to Hell, and it attracted all kinds of nasty things to town. Monsters. And of course, every now and then demons would crawl out of it. But the worst part was it just sort of poisoned everything."

"How so?"

"The entire town felt off. I never noticed it, really, until it was pointed out to me, but nothing ever seemed to really go right. For every good thing you got, there were always three bad things waiting for you to let your guard down. Give you an example. Tony got a raise once, when I was thirteen or fourteen, and the magnanimous prick took me and Mom out to dinner. A really nice place, by our standards. Of course, by regular restaurant standards, it was basically family night at the Golden Corral, but that didn't matter. My father was finally doing something nice for the family and for once I actually felt like he gave a shit about me."

Xander took a deep breath. "So we were having a great time. The food was good, dad was telling jokes and had talked to me like I was a human being, and I was having a great time. And on the way home, we get into a car accident. Not just a little fender bender, either. Our car was totalled and Tony was put in the hospital for a month because of injuries sustained. And of course, he ended up blaming us; if he hadn't been wasting money on us in a restaurant, we'd never have been on the road to get hit and he'd not only not have to replace the car, but the tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills wouldn't have been there. Can I get a drink of water or something?"

The abrupt switch from narrative story to direct question caught Samson off guard. "Oh, yeah, sure." The doctor eyed the restraints for a moment before rising. He knocked on the door and spoke to the guard standing outside for a moment, then waited until the woman brought a flimsy paper cup. Samson filled it from the sink in the bathroom, then held it for Xander as he drank.

Xander kept an eye on the psychiatrist as he drank his water. "I know you're having a hard time swallowing all this. I know I sure did, when it was finally laid out in front of me. But the town was just evil." He stared into space for a moment. "My first friends were two kids I met in kindergarten. Willow Rosenberg and Jesse McNally. Of all the things that kept me from turning into my dad, I give them the biggest amount of credit; them and Giles, who has been a better dad in a year and a half than Tony was over the preceding sixteen years. But mostly it was Willow and Jesse. They kept me from drowning in it, you know?"

Samson just nodded.

"We had a lot in common. We had all been born in Sunnydale, we all had less than joyous childhoods, and we'd all lost someone close to us. Like my brother Gavin, Willow's older sister Aspen..."

"Wait... Willow's sister was named Aspen?"

"Yep. Aspen Rosenberg."

"They were both named after trees?"

Xander shrugged. "Could have been worse. I went to high school with a guy named Fernando Valenzuela Dusendorf. Not a Hispanic bone in his body. German, in fact. His dad was just a huge fan of the Dodgers, and they won the World Series in 1981."

"So weird names weren't..."

"Nope. I also went to school with an Asia, an Aria, a Ludwig, and a Harmony."

They both chuckled at that. "Believe me, I understand. Try being a skinny kid at Hebrew school when your last name is Samson. And at least my first name is Leonard. You want to see a bad time, you should have seen my little brother Moses."

Xander was agog. "Your little brother's name is Moses Samson? Tell me his middle name isn't David."

"Joshua." Samson said with a laugh. "If you know anything about the Bible, you know that's almost as bad."

The two laughed together for a while over the silliness of names. Eventually, though, it wound down and Xander resumed the narrative. "Anyway, like I said, Willow's sister Aspen disappeared into thin air while walking home from work one night, though there was talk about her being seen running around later on with a one of those PCP Gangs. And Jesse's mom was found dead in an alley just outside the place she worked.."

"And you really think its because your town is build over the mouth of Hell?"

"Yeah. It was a magnet for all the vampires." Xander saw Samson's face and was quiet for a moment. "Doc, you're a superhero. You've met at least one honest-to-God god I can think of. You've met aliens. Is it really that hard for you to imagine that a dimensional rift into Hell lies beneath a California town and that monsters are attracted to it? Captain America has fought vampires. So has the Hulk, for that matter. Compared to a lot of things, vampires just aren't that hard to accept, you know?"

**XxxxxxX**

They brought him clothing, of course. He was no longer in the hospital, so naturally they had to put him in something other than a hospital gown. The clothing turned out to be three prison-orange shirts, three matching sets of prison-orange pants, some flip flops (what his mother always used to call shower shoes), three pair of underwear (granny panties, he noted) and three brassieres.

He ignored the underwear and the brassieres, of course. For the first two days, he never even considered the need for him to wear a top. At home, lounging around in his room, he would usually only put a shirt on when he went out, or when he came downstairs to eat with the parents, or when he had company over. Hell, sometimes he just lounged around in his underwear as long as he could. He was a guy, after all. And it wasn't the first time he'd "gone commando".

So it didn't bother him to wear the prison pants without anything under them, or to wander around his new cell without a shirt on. On the second morning, though, Agent Dunne had come in and specifically ordered him to cover himself up. He was a minor, and wandering around naked where the surveillance cameras and the guys behind the one-way glass (they weren't even trying to hide the fact that they were watching him anymore) could see his tits just wasn't a proper thing for a minor to be doing. Xander eventually caved and started wearing one of the shirts when wandering around the room. Agent Dunne had also warned Xander of making noises while he was playing with himself. They weren't going to do anything to stop him from doing that, but he should be aware that the sounds could be picked up on the microphones. Xander had never blushed so hard in his life.

But even then, he still ignored the underwear.

He spend much of the second day watching television and thinking. The television was pretty basic, and the channel choices limited. There was PBS, and CSPAN, and ESPN, the Cartoon Network, the Home Shopping Channel, the Game Show Network, and the National Geographic Channel. And that was it. It was watching television that he got his third huge shock. Not only was he trapped in a girl's body, not only was he trapped in the Marvel Universe, but apparently he'd moved ten years forward in time. By entering this universe, he'd somehow gone from October 31, 1996 to (according to Agent Dunne) January 30, 2006. And then he'd spent the next five and a half months in a coma. The thought amused and horrified him all at once: _I am a time-travelling dimension-hopping man trapped in the body of a female superhero! _His Uncle Rory would call this situation "too weird for television."

He'd settled down in front of the wall-mounted television, watching a rerun of Pyramid, watching some actor he'd never heard of named Richard Milligan or Richard Mulligan or something that like being embarrassed by a very young Billy Crystal, who was leading his game-show partner, a housewife from Paduca or something, to fame and glory. Not really thinking about the game, he sort of drifted into some deep thoughts.

Thoughts about his situation (_Probably hopeless...)_, about the body (_I AM NOT A GIRL, DAMN IT!_), and about being held in a prison cell by a spy agency right out of the comics. (_Surreal._) It was only when he wasn't concentrating on things that he realized that he could remember...

Everything.

Everything that made up Power Girl's life.

And it wasn't just the comic book stuff, either. The memories he had of Power Girl's life didn't just include beating up supervillains and flying and being stronger than anyone except her fellow Kryptonians, but everything. Alongside memories of putting a fist through Braniac's latest robot body were memories of going out to a dance club with some of her friends and pretending to get as drunk as they did because there was no way that any amount of alcohol would have any effect on her at all. Sure, he could remember her secret identity, and the real names of her teammates on the Justice Society, the Justice League, and Infinity, Inc., but he also remembered Power Girl's home phone number. And her favorite color. And what her favorite fruit was. And whether she voted Democrat or Republican. Things he didn't think were ever mentioned in the comic book.

The secret identity thing had twigged him for a moment, when he realized that the SHIELD agents had called him "Karen Starr" at one point. Apparently there was a Karen Starr in the Marvel Universe. That was weird enough, but the implications...

He'd read enough Marvel to know that there weren't any secret Kryptonians sneaking around. If Karen Starr actually existed in the MU, it wasn't the same Karen Starr as from DC. For two entire hours he contemplated the meaning of it, and came to no conclusions.

He eventually figured out that the most important Power Girl memories were of the superpowers Power Girl possessed, and how to use them. Some things appeared to be instinctual, like how to handle objects without crushing them into dust, or how to not fly all the time. Others took a few moment's thought to bring up the right memory, like how to concentrate in just such a way as to cast his vision into the higher and lower Electromagnetic frequencies. It turned out that X-Ray Vision didn't work like in the comics. What he saw were X-Ray images of the walls and what was behind them and not clear images like he saw when he was looking at the normal light range. That came as a surprise.

The first thing he did with it was locate all the hidden cameras and microphones implanted in the walls, the ceiling, and some of the furnishings of the room he was in. Surprisingly, there weren't any of the former in the bathroom, though there were two of the latter. Despite the fact that it did not have a door, apparently SHIELD was courtesous enough to give him some level of privacy in the bathroom.

He argued with himself for nearly twenty minutes before finally deciding on how to test his heat vision. The Power Girl memories clearly showed her using it for certain acts of bodily hygiene, and while originally Xander figured he didn't care because he was a guy, and not a girl, eventually he decided that five months growth of leg and underarm hair had to be disposed of. He justified it to himself simple: he wasn't too fond of women who let their legs and underarms get hairy. Since he was trapped in a girl's body, he might as well keep it neat. After all, he'd never found armpit or leg hair attractive on any girl he'd ever panted after. Why shouldn't he keep to the same standards he insisted upon when it came to his personal taste in women?

So, relying on the memories of Power Girl doing this, he turned his heat vision onto his own legs in an effort to depilitate. His first attempt made a five inch square area on his thigh feel like he'd been sunburned. The second attempt, made with the heat vision at a much lower intensity, just made the hair curl up and smell burned. The third attempt was much better, and he was able to get rid of the leg-hair on those areas he could see, as well as the hair in his armpits. He eventually got the hang of it, and after that it was easy-peasy.

De-bushying his eyebrows was another matter. Power Girl's memories showed him a process involving getting very, very close to the mirror and trick-shotting his heat vision off of it and onto individual hairs. He thought about it, and thought about it, and afterward just decided that for the duration of his stay in this body, its eyebrows would be bushy.

And he never once considered doing anything about the hair in his "bikini region."

**XxxxxxX**

"Well, I... um..." Samson had been broadsided. "I've never met any vampires personally, but I've heard stories from Captain America..."

"Right. Well, Sunnydale had a vampire problem. A bad vampire problem. And everyone knew it, but no one would admit it. Some people would come up with the stupidest things to explain it away. My friends and I eventually started calling it 'Sunnydale Syndrome.' But the vamps were real, and they were killing people by the dozen sometime."

Samson sat silent for a moment, then opened his mouth. Before he could speak, Xander continued.

"I can tell you're still skeptical, Doc." Xander sighed. "Let me give you an example, okay?" The psychicatrist's made the universal 'keep going' hand motion. "There are ten elementary schools in Sunnydale, four middle schools, and three high schools. Now I don't know anything about Westbook High, or Oaks Christian School, but I can tell you this: when I started kindergarten at Wilkins Memorial Elementary, there were sixty kids in kindergarten with me; three classes of twenty kids apiece." The kid was on a roll, and didn't even pause. "Now, even if you assume a ridiculous number of kids leaving... say one in five kids leave because their folks move to a new town, or they get held back a grade, or they're sick and can't start school with the rest of their graduating class... even if you accepted 1 in 5 kids not moving on to middle school with the other kids their age, you'd still expect almost fifty kids from Wilkins Memorial to make it to Kendall Avenue Middle, right?"

Samson did some quick math in his head. "Okay, sure. Call it fifty kids, sure. What do you..."

"What I'm talking about is that 50 kids didn't move on to Kendall. Thirty-eight did. When I started at Kendall Middle, there were a grand total of a hundred and fourteen new students, when there should have been a hundred and ninety. A year later and my graduating class has only ninety-four students in it. As of Halloween, the last day I remember being in Sunnydale, there were only eighty-two. By the time we graduate from Sunnydale High? Who knows. There might be only fifty of us left."

Samson's jaw hit the floor. "My God! Are you telling me that all those missing kids were killed by vampires?"

"Yeah." Xander blinked. "Yeah. Well, most of them. We had a lot of suspiciously violent deaths and disappearances. Okay, it wasn't, like, literally all of them. I mean, not all of them were killed by vampires. Some of the kids I knew who died did so for completely normal explainable reasons. Like this guy I knew, Davie Harris in my freshman year. He got hit by a semi-truck riding his ten-speed down Highway 225. One of the cheerleaders got leukemia. Josie Bartlet disappeared and everyone assumed she was dead, but she eventually turned up in Arizona at her older sister's place, perfectly fine. This guy named Scott Shelton, one of the stoners, got his hands on some Ivory Snow-level heroin and overdosed..."

"Sorry, um, 'Ivory Snow'?" Samson asked.

"Yeah, you know, like the soap? Ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent pure?"

"Ah. Right. Sorry, go on."

"Yeah, so not everyone who died or disappeared did it under weird circumstances. Just most of them. They just vanished off the face of the earth, or died from tripping while carrying a barbecue fork, or suffered a 'neck rupture', or got caught by a gang on PCP." Xander gave a cynical chuckle. "There was a lot of gangs on PCP running around Sunnydale."

They were both silent for a good while. Then Samson shifted in his seat. "Barbecue forks and gangs on PCP?"

"Sunnydale Syndrome. The police in Sunnydale are deeply stupid. They would investigate a mysterious death and then file a lot of reports that listed the cause of death as blood loss due to a barbecue fork injury to the neck." At Samson's continuing blank look, Xander formed his hand into a grabby, fanged claw-shape and then made a "grr argh" noise while biting the air with the 'fangs".

"Ah. Right. The vampires."

"Yeah. And when mass attacks happened, they were never performed by vampires, but by a gang on PCP."

They both fell silent, not sure how to proceed.

"You were telling me about learning that words hurt?" Samson asked.

"Oh, yeah, right. Well... the reason I told you about Sunnydale is because you have to understand about my friends, and why I don't like to talk about them much. There I was, this lonely abused kid whose parents were drunks. I show up for kindergarten not knowing what to expect, and run into this kid named Jesse. He would end up being by best bud right up until the day he died. He was the only brother I ever had, you know? Even though he wasn't really..."

"Sure, I understand. Family isn't always the ones you were born to.

"Precisely. And along with Jesse was Willow, who even today is the sister I never had. So there we were, new kids in kindergarten, and we all had something in common: the town had taken a loved one from us. And because of that, we were tentative and shy, and a bit stand-offish, and thus became the favorite pick-on target for all the kids who got off on picking on others. And boy did we get picked on. I got it because my folks were the town drunks. Willow was a bookworm even when she was five. And Jesse... its hard to describe because he's was my friend, but you know how there's always one kid who is willing to do things like eat bugs or worms on a dare, and could be counted on to pick his nose in public? That was Jesse. He could be annoying, more annoying than anyone would ever put up with, but me and Wills would put up with him, because he might be an annoying jerk, but he was our annoying jerk."

Xander abruptly rubbed at his eyes. Samson could see a glisten in them, so he kept silent for a momemt. When Xander once again seemed collected, the psychiatrist asked, "So the three of you banded together out of self-defense?"

"Yeah."

"And did it work?"

"Well, yeah. It worked pretty well. I mean, it didn't stop the really bad bullies, and Cordelia Chase... she was the alpha preppy rich bitch that every school seems to have... just spread her venom out to all of us instead of concentrating it, but having someone at your back, letting you know that no matter what the bullies thought, you were okay and they liked you... yeah, it worked. Got us through elementary school and middle school and into high school. In fact, it wasn't until..."

Xander stopped abruptly, as if words were caught in his throat.

"Until?" Samson prompted.

Xander swallowed visibly. "Well... until the day Buffy arrived. That was the day Jesse was killed."

"Buffy is another one of your friends?"

"Yeah. She's..." Xander was quiet again for a long while, before finally saying, almost a whisper, "She's my hero."

"You said Jesse was killed on the same day that your friend Buffy first arrived. Arrived from where?"

"Oh!" Xander stopped. "Sorry, I left some stuff out. She was the new girl. Just moved to Sunnydale from Los Angeles. Really attractive. Blonde. I... um... I was crushing on her for a while. I'm not quite over it yet, but I'm getting there. She's made it clear that she treasures me as a friend, but only as a friend."

Samson gave a tight smile. "Friends for real or brush-off friends?"

"For real. Seriously, she just... didn't want to date me. But that's okay. Either she'll come around, or I'll get over it and find someone new."

There was another quiet spot.

"When you mentioned that Jesse was killed on the same day Buffy arrived, it sounded for a moment as if you blamed her for Jesse's death."

"What? No! Doc, that's just... that's just crazy talk. Buffy didn't do anything to get Jesse killed. She tried to save him, and did end up saving Willow. She just... couldn't get to Jesse in time."

"What happened ot Jesse, Xander? How was he killed?"

At those words, Xander closed himself off. His face became blank, and his voice became that steady, almost monotone that people who were wound just a little too tightly used when they were terrified, or enraged, or both. He thought about how to answer the question, came up with a dozen different ways, and finally just said, "A vampire. It caught him, killed him, and turned him."

"Turned him?" The confusion was clear on the psychiatrist's face.

"Into a vampire. And then it used Jesse as bait in a trap for Buffy."

"Did the trap work?"

"No. Buffy got us out of that one, too. But later on, Jesse was attacking Cordelia Chase, and I..."

"The same Cordelia Chase who tormented you and your friends?" Samson asked.

"That's her. Anyway, Jesse was attacking Cordelia Chase, and I couldn't let that happen, so I stopped him." Xander's voice became even colder.

"Stopped him how?"

Xander rubbed at his eyes, where tears were forming. "I rammed a stake into his heart and watched him collapse into dust. I destroyed the monster who had taken the place of my best friend." And with that, he started sobbing.

**XxxxxxX**

On the third day, Agent Dunne informed Xander that he'd be getting evaluated by a psychiatrist, so that the people in charge could get an idea of what his mental state was in. This would help them make a decision regarding what they were eventually going to do with him. He wasn't looking forward to it.

But at least it was a change. After three days in the box-like cell, he was bored out of his skull. Even the kid's shows on PBS weren't entertaining im anymore. He'd begun daydreaming about escaping, using the body's heightened senses to case the building he was in. There were, intriguingly, some areas he couldn't see into. His curiousity made him wonder, but it was an idle thing.

For a short time, he amused himself by listening in to the conversations of the people who watched him. His cell was supposedly sound-proofed, but any sound outside caused a micrvibration, and he could pick it up through the walls. But that grew boring when he realized that SHIELD agents talked about the same boring things when they were at work as anybody else: their wives or girlfriends, their husbands and boyfriends, their kids, their grandkids, this new restaurant that you just absolutely had to try, the movies they'd seen, what they were planning this weekend, the weather, and which sports teams won and lost.

He slept as much as he could, but a combination of Kryptonian physiology which didn't need much sleep anyway and actually getting bored with sleeping (something Xander never thought possibly), even sleeping lost its luster. Even worse than getting bored with sleep were the dreams. He was having dreams of Buffy and Willow and Giles, having all sorts of adventures with some vaguely familiar new guy. He dreamed that Buffy had slept with Angel, and as a result, the vampire had lost his soul and turned evil again. It was only a dream, but it still gave him the willies. And so even sleeping lost its charms.

He'd asked Agent Dunne for a toothbrush, and was given a small kit that had a sliver of soap that wouldn't look out of place in a motel, a soft plastic tube of toothpaste, and a rubber toothbrush that bent to a ridiculous angle if he put too much pressure on it. When he asked Dunne about the weird toothbrush, the agent had calmly and cooly explained that it had been specifically designed for use by prisoners. It was just stiff enough to be useful to clean your teeth, but soft enough that no amount of work on the part of the prisoner would turn it into a shiv.

And it turned out that the plastic one-use tube of toothpaste was water soluble. Again, so it couldn't be weaponized by a prisoner. Xander had freaked when the tube had melted and the toothpaste got all over the sink. Taking care of his dental needs, not to mention giving himself a hobo bath in the sink, occupied him for about half an hour.

Bored, bored, bored, bored.

**XxxxxxX**

And on the fourth day, the psychiatrist arrived. Agent Dunne had come into his cell with four other agents. Two stood by the door, their hands worryingly on their weapons, while the other two approached. They were carrying what looked to Xander like shackles.

Turned out they were shackles. At Agent Dunne's instruction, Xander stood perfectly still while one agent put the metal cuffs around both of his ankles. The other agent cuffed his hands; thankfully, his hands were cuffed to his front and not behind his back. A set of metal bars were put into place between his ankles, with another set between his wrists. These hampered his ability to walk, and made it almost impossible to move his hands together usefully. And then one of the agents ran a chain from the ankles to his hands and then up to his neck. And then they sat him down at the table in his cell, and chained his ankles to the bench, whichitself was bolted to the floor. They really didn't want him moving during the psychiatrist's visit.

His memories of Power Girl told Xander that he could get out of these cuffs if he wanted to, but he'd promised to be cooperative in exchange for eventually being let go, so he was cooperative. As easy as escape would be, he really didn't have a beef with SHIELD, and didn't want to be on their bad side.

As expected, Agent Dunne carefully explained that the restraints were for the safety of the visiting psychiatrist. Xander couldn't fault their reasoning, and wasn't really in the mood to cause trouble, so he put up with it.

He couldn't help but laugh when the man finally arrived. Impressively tall. Taller, in fact, than the body's own six feet, two inches. Muscled like a professional wrestler. And green hair. Bright green hair.

He couldn't help it. He laughed.

While he was laughing the doctor settled himself on the other side of Xander's table with a note pad and a couple of pens, and waited for the laughter to die down. When Xander was finished, the doctor smiled and said, "Well. You're in a good mood. This is great. Care to share the joke?"

"Oh sure. Its nothing personal, I promise. Its just that when they told me a psychiatrist was coming to evaluate me. I never in a thousand years thought it would be Doc Samson!"

"Oh, you've heard of me?"

**XxxxxxX**

**Author's Note:** If you see something you recognize, it belongs to either Marvel or Mutant Enemy. If you don't recognize it, there's a very good chance that I came up with it.

**Author's Note the Second:** For most of the writing of this chapter, I was listening to my very eclectic Pandora setup (25 stations, each with ten artists, none of whom are repeated, all set on "Shuffle" so its constantly bouncing from channel to channel. When I started writing this chapter, the first song to come up was the Seether/Amy Lee song "Broken. When I finished it, the song was the Leonard Cohen classic "Hallelujah." I couldn't have planned that better if I tried.

**Author's Note the Third:** No, this story isn't out of order. Its a stylistic choice. I'm interspersing the conversations with Leonard Samson with flashbacks to the time between Xander waking up and Samson arriving. I just figured that the readers were smart enough to get it without me having to slap a big, intrusive, **FLASHBACK** on the flashbacks, because in my opinion only shitty, unskilled, insecure writers have to point out when they use flashbacks, and only unintelligent readers need to have them pointed out.

I added this third note five different people told me that I somehow got my paragraphs out of order.


	5. … While You're Busy Making Other Plans

**Chapter Five: **… **While You're Busy Making Other Plans**

_"The assistance of counsel is one of the safeguards of the Sixth Amendment deemed necessary to insure fundamental human rights of life and liberty. The Sixth Amendment stands as a constant admonition that, if the Constitutional safeguards it provides be lost, justice will not still be done."_ -– **Justice Hugo Black**, writing the majority opinion for _Gideon v. Wainwright_ (372 US 335 1963).

**XxxxxxX**

The entire thing took three hours. At the end of it, Xander felt emotionally drained. He had to admit that as a psychiatrist, Leonard Samson was a good one. He'd got Xander to open up about his abusive home life, his feelings toward Buffy, Willow, and Giles, his feelings of personal inadequacy, and his fear of never measuring up to his much smarter and more accomplished friends. He'd even talked about the basic loneliness he'd been experiencing ever since showing up in this world.

He wasn't sure what was going to come of it, but Xander felt pretty good about his talk with the doctor. But even so... he hadn't survived the Hellmouth without being cautious. The agents came into the cell to release him from his restraints as the doctor left, but Xander didn't pay them any more attention than he had to.

Instead, he followed Leonard Samson's journey through the building with his x-ray vision, and consciously cranked his hearing up to the point that he was hearing every single vibration in the building. By the time Samson stopped in someone's office, Xander had managed to isolate every sound he heard except those made by the psychiatrist. And shortly thereafter, the people the doctor was talking to.

He recognized Agent Dunne's voice and was quickly able to figure out which one of the three other people in the office she was. The other two he didn't recognize.

**XxxxxxX**

No one said anything as Agent Dunne handed out coffee, then settled into the couch next to Samson. Agent Understone tapped a pen on his desk idly as Copella made himself comfortable leaning up against a wall. When everyone was settled, Understone finally spoke.

"So... what do you think of our 'Mister Harris', Doctor?"

Samson took a deep breath. "She's a loon."

"A loon? Is that a technical term, Doc?" Copella couldn't help but chuckle. Even the normally taciturn Dunne had a slight grin on her face.

"Oh, you want technical terms? All right." Samson was very careful to avoid calling the girl a patient; if she was his patient, he couldn't tell them the results of his evaluation due to Doctor-Patient privilege "The individual demonstrates a paranoid psycho-disassociative and disaffective pathology with an overly intricate world construct. That make it any clearer for you, Agent Copella?"

"Okay, so she's crazy." Copella said, still chuckling.

"I'd say so. She's utterly delusional and separated from reality. She constructed a fantasy life for herself that was more attractive to her than the real one, and jumped right in with both feet. And I have to tell you, this is great stuff. I could make a career out of this poor girl. And the amazing thing about her psychosis is that absolutely none of it requires a shred of proof. She even admits she can't prove what she's saying, but doesn't care because she knows its true. Most paranoid delusions are intricate, but this one? This one is a masterpiece."

"I've heard a lot of stories from prisoners, but 'I'm a refugee from another dimension where a TV show is real' is a new one." Understone just shook his head.

"Me too," Samson admitted. "Now, if it was just a claim about being from an alternate dimension, I wouldn't necessarily dismiss it. Reed Richards has basically proven that alternate realities exist, and the Avengers have been to a couple, and I think that Blackhawk guy was actually from one, or something. So its not the claim of being from an alternate universe that is the problem."

"Let me guess," Copella pressed against the wall he was leaning against, straightening up. He pulled on his jacket's tails to fix the shoulders. "The problem is, she claims she's from a television show."

"Well... that's actually less weird than it could be. The Avengers once met a bunch of superheroes who only exist here in comic books. There were differences, but the characters were quite close to the comics. So technically I suppose its possible that there's a universe out there that resembles a television series. But no... the problem is, we know she's not from there. Her identity's been confirmed by evidence."

"So... Doctor, I mean... did my job just get harder?" Agent Dunne shifted in her seat and sipped the coffee. "If she's really crazy, is she going to be a danger to my people?"

"Actually, I don't think so. I think she's going to turn out to be one of those rare functional schizophrenics. It happens every so often. Sure, they're crazy, but they've found a way to mesh their insanity with the actual world and thus can function as a contributing member of society. Ever see that movie about what's-his-name? The schizophrenic mathematician? You know, the one that won the Oscar, and starred that guy from 'Gladiator?' Anyway, the mathematician they based that story on was a real guy, and really was schizophrenic, and he had a brilliant career despite being utterly nuts."

This made Copella chuckle again. "Nuts? Doc, you have to stop using these big medical terms."

This made Samson smile. "What I mean is that, sure, she believes she's a character in a television show. But as long as she didn't make a point of telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry she met on the street, that particular kind of crazy wouldn't keep her from holding down a job, or associating with other people on a normal basis. Hell, if she found someone who knew about her psychosis, was prepared to put up with it, and was dedicated to her enough to actually go through with putting up with it, she could even have a satisfying love life for all I know. Its happened before."

Samson paused before continuing, as if double-checking his own thought processes. "Will she get violent if her fantasy is challenged, like some schizophrenics? No. I don't think so. I think if you were to challenge the idea that she was really some guy from a TV show, stuck inside a female body, she'd roll her eyes at you as if you were an idiot and just keep doing what she's doing. Her delusion is that much ingrained. She's going to be a hard nut to crack for whichever therapist ends up with her as a patient."

"We noticed... well, Agent Copella noticed, actually... that some of the things she told you weren't from the show." Understone said. "What's up with that?"

"Really? I wouldn't have recognized that. I never watched that show when it was on. I suspect that she's using her own history to fill in the holes that the show's back story doesn't cover. I didn't get enough of a background to tell for sure, but I'd be willing to bet good money on her being abused by her father and neglected by her mother. I'm thinking her dad really was the drunken bruiser she described him as. Ms. Starr probably sees her mother as an enabler. A neglectful contributor to the abuse who should have done something about it but never did. Never stood up for her daughter. So Mom is seen as being just as bad as dad."

"Think there's sexual abuse?"

"No telling." Samson shrugged. "I think she had some sort of traumatic experience, but I don't know what precisely. She gave no indicator that she was molested by either of her parents, but the fact that she denies her own physical gender yet simultaneously does not identify as transgendered tells me that there is some psychological resistance to the idea of being female."

The psychologist sat back and sipped at his coffee. "Its trite and soap-opera-ish, but its entirely possible that her resistance to the idea of being female is grounded in some sexual trauma. A rape maybe? I don't know..." He put his cup down on the table next to him. "This is the problem with evaluations. I don't have enough depth to say for certain what the cause of the problem is."

Understone nodded. It was about what he expected. "All right. Thanks, Doc. I'll make sure the check gets to you as soon as possible. In the meantime... Dunne, let's get her on the registry and get her into the lab for testing. I'll shoot the results of the evaluation upstairs; hopefully it won't take long to hear back about what the boss wants done with her." With that, Samson stood, shook hands all around, and left with Agent Dunne as an escort out of the building.

Three floors down, Xander sat and wondered what all that had meant. The doctor hadn't accepted his explanations, and thought he was making up his story. The people holding him thought that he was actually a girl who was insane rather than the truth.

Thing is, he could see where they were coming from. "Yeah, well... when you hear hoof beats, you think horses, not zebras. And I'm not just a zebra, I'm a zebra with a unicorn horn and Pegasus wings." The sound of his own voice echoed loudly in his head, and he willed his hearing back down to its normal level.

Xander pondered the meaning of being on a registry, and then began worrying about the nature of the tests they planned on putting him through. He was still looking to be cooperative, because the agents had all said cooperation would get him released. He just wondered how many more hoops he'd have to jump before they thought he'd been cooperating enough.

He threw himself onto the bunk and lay there, staring up at the ceiling. "Why, oh why, couldn't you have been thrown into a fictional universe where people aren't as paranoid? I bet nobody in the _Brady Bunch_ universe would have thrown me in jail just for existing..."

Eventually, the boredom caused him to fall asleep.

**XxxxxxX**

He'd been staring out the window of his cell, just enjoying the feeling of the sunlight hitting his skin, when the speakers in his ceiling made that 'we're turning on' squeak. Agent Shemp, sitting behind the one way glass on the other side of the room, had something to say to Xander. Using his x-ray vision to look through the mirroring on the glass was different from looking through walls, so he could see Shemp pretty clearly. He actually got detail instead of... well... an x-ray view, but everything did look grayed out and monochromatic.

"Sit down on the bench facing away from the door with your hands holding the table behind you and your ankles cross." Ah. Someone was coming. This was the standard security precaution they ordered every time someone came into the cell. Supposedly, the few seconds it would take for him to get out of this awkward position would be long enough for them to close the door before he could get out. If only they knew.

There were three separate agents assigned around the clock to keep an eye on him. Xander called them Moe, Larry, and Shemp. At one point there had been a Curly, a young woman who looked far too young, in Xander's opinion, to be a SHIELD agent. Xander had spent one afternoon so bored out of his mind that he stared at her for a couple of hours, just watching everything she was doing.

He didn't do that again. The young woman had been so unnerved by his "accidentally looking right where she was sitting", no matter where she sat or worked, that she'd never come back to observation duty. Xander cut it out for fear of giving the game away, and shortly after that, Agent Curly was replaced by Agent Shemp.

"Xander, I brought some papers." It was Agent Dunne. Xander held his place until he heard the door close and lock behind her. Then he turned around in place. The agent had already sat and was fanning through a small stack of papers in a manilla folder. "These are for your registration with the Metahuman Affairs Agency. There are also some medical waivers that say you are granting us permission to run some tests to gauge the exact extent of your powers and abilities."

"What kind of tests are we talking about?" Xander asked. A sudden image of being strapped down to a surgical table as a deranged robot slowly chopped him into cutlets flashed through his mind. "Nothing painful, I hope?"

"Did you ever take a physical fitness test in school?"

"Uh... yeah, sure. Did a bunch of sit ups and push ups and pull-ups if I remember. I think we eve ran a hundred-yard dash." Xander squinted. "So those sorts of test?"

"Basically." Agent Dunne smiled primly. "There are some... interesting variations... but for the most part yeah, its basically going to be a PT test. We're also going to check on your reaction time, and give you an eye exam and a hearing test. Get a baseline body temperature. See if we can get any readings on your blood pressure and your resting heart rate... things like that. To tell you the truth, I don't think we're going to get much in the way of biometrics from you." At Xander's askance look, she added, "They already tried, while you were unconscious, and got very little."

Xander accepted the first packet of papers from her, along with a pen. Xander noticed the trend again; the pen she gave him was a cheap Bic; it would write, but if he tried to turn it into a weapon it would probably bend out of shape or shatter into pieces too small and unwieldy and fragile to be useful.

He started filling out the top form with his name, his birthday, where he was from, and so on. But shortly he stopped and stared at the sheet. "What is this, Agent Dunne?"

"What is what?"

"Code name? They're asking for a code name?"

Dunne shrugged. "Most superhumans have a code name, even the ones who aren't active superheroes tend to come up with one."

He stared at her for a moment. She merely stared back, smiling.

"Am I required to have one?" He really didn't want to be a superhero. Despite the powers, his plan was to find a way to get back to Sunnydale. He wasn't going to waste his time trying to beat down the Hulk or Ultron or anything.

"Well... yes and no. You're not required to pick one, but if you don't pick one yourself the MAA will assign you one anyway, and you might not like the one they come up with."

Xander's eyebrows lifted. "Really? How do you mean?"

"Really. I've see a file on a woman in Camden. She's in her forties, married, a housewife. Her code name is 'Backhoe'. And there's another guy down in Savannah. He's in his sixties, retired Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant, decorated war hero who served in Viet Nam. Tough as nails. He got stuck with 'Mister Rainbow' as his code name. So yeah. You might want to think about what you want to be called." Dunne tapped the sheet with a fingernail.

"Right." Xander stared at the sheet a moment. "I'll come back to it."

Shortly he came to the place where he was supposed to list his various powers. There was a ludicrously long line of check-boxes, with empty space below it marked 'Other Powers Not Listed Above.' Agent Dunne noticed the hesitation.

"Complete disclosure of your powers is required. If you develop something new later on, you can report it, but if the MAA finds out that you had a power and didn't tell us, its considered non-compliance and punishable by jail time and a fine."

"Uh..." Xander looked from the woman to the form and back. "And what if you don't know about your powers? I mean, you guys were the ones who told me I had them."

"In that case, leave it blank and we'll fill it out after your testing."

"Right... the testing..." Xander bent back over the form and started writing again.

The testing began the next day.

**XxxxxxX**

Xander followed Agent Dunne into the room, with three other agents behind her. It was an impressive room, at least three stories tall and mostly filled with strange high-tech machinery. He was led over to one machine that was being fussed with by a man in a lab coat. Xander took the time to actually look at the gizmo, and realized that what it reminded him of was half a auto shop's car lift.

Dunne handed the man the file... Xander presumed it was his file... then came back and released Xander's hands from the shackles he'd been wearing. Xander rubbed at his wrists as Agent Dunne followed by carefully removing the collar from around Xander's neck. He rubbed at his wrists a bit, just for show. Xander couldn't help but notice that the other three SHIELD agents were all standing with their hands on their guns, watching his every move as if they were cats who had just spotted a baby bird.

"Okay." The man had finally stopped tapping on the controls of the machine and had turned around. He opened up the file and read as he spoke. "Okay. Miss... Karen Starr? Karen, I'm Doctor Vosbury; I'm a diagnostic engineer, and that's a fancy way of saying I make sure all these sci-fi movie stuff works. What we're gonna... wait." The man looked from the file to Xander and chuckled. "You're calling yourself Power Girl?" He shook his head. "A bit corny, but I suppose it could be worse."

Xander just shrugged. "It was the first thing I could think of." And besides, it fit the body. "And its Xander. Xander Harris. Not Karen."

The engineer's eyes flicked to Agent Dunne then back to Xander. "Of course. Sorry about that. My mistake. Now, if you could step over here, Miss Harris, we'll begin." Xander gritted his teeth but didn't say anything. He followed the scientist over to the strange looking machine and waited.

"All right. So..." the engineer positioned himself next to the machine, and put his arms under the flattened crossbar that sat on the top of what looked like two pistons. "What I'd like you to do is stand here, then lift the crossbar like so." He did just that. The crossbar seemed to lift easily, and Vosbury stepped forward so that it was directly over his head. "There are two pressure pads on the underside of the bar; those are a safety measure, so its important that you keep your hands on the pressure pads while you do this. So anyway, you lift it like this and stand here. I'll turn on the machine and the test will begin. With me so far?"

Xander nodded. He thought he knew where this was going. The question once again popped into his head: just how much did he want SHIELD to know about what this body could do?

"Great! Now once the test starts, the bar will be pulled downward. What we want you to do is hold the bar up against the downward pressure for as long as you can. The longer you go, the heavier the bar will feel. If at any time the weight becomes too heavy for you, just pull your arms down. When the pressure is off the pads I told you about, the pistons lock in place so the bar doesn't come down and hit you in the head." Vosbury pulled his arms down quickly, and like he said, the pistons stayed where they were. "This first test is just to roughly find out how much you can lift over your head. The next will be to find out how long you can hold it."

"So... um... how heavy does it get?"

Vosbury grinned. "Well, this system was devised by Reed Richards as a means to test the Thing's strength levels. If I remember correctly, the last time it was measured the Thing could lift something like sixty or seventy tons and hold it over his head for nearly fifteen minutes."

"Okay. That's cool. Um... another question, how fast does it get really heavy?"

Vosbury blinked. "I usually don't get asked that question. Its an interesting question, though, isn't it?" The man was enthusiastic. Clearly, the techno-geek was proud of his toys. "I think it varies. I mean, I had Captain America in here once and it took him about ten seconds to get to his maximum capacity. Thor took nearly four minutes to get to the point where he was straining."

Agent Dunne cleared her throat. "Let's just get on with it, shall we?"

"Right." Vosbury stepped to a control panel on the machine, and the pistons slowly lowered with the hiss of escaping pressure. The engineer then gave Xander the 'after you' gesture toward the machine. Still wondering how he was going to handle this, Xander stepped into place and lifted the crossbar over his head.

"Agent Dunne, if you'd step back please." Vosbury said, then turned back to the control panel. "All right, Kar... um. Xander. We're going to start the test in 5, 4, 3, 2, begin."

Xander didn't notice any difference in the weight of the crossbar. After a few seconds he sort of shook himself mentally and started a count in his head. _One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi... _ Xander's thoughts were a muddle, but one thing he remembered from Giles' endless lectures was that you never let a potential enemy know your true strengths and weaknesses. The thought _All war is deception_ filtered in from somewhere... maybe from the Power Girl memories. Either way, he wasn't about to tell these people just how strong he really was. It was the same reason why he pretended his powers were gone when they put him in the nullifying collar.

_...Forty Mississippi, Forty-One Mississippi, Forty-Two Mississippi..._

He figured maybe making it to some odd, unpredictable number like fifty-seven, or even sixty-three, would be enough. A voice in the back of his head was telling him that if he made it a nice round number, someone would notice. So no stopping at a minute even, or even at any number divisible by ten or five.

_...Fifty-Nine Mississippi, Sixty Mississippi, Sixty-One Mississippi, Sixty-Two Mississippi..._

At a count of fifty-nine, Xander had given his arms a little bit of a tremor, and at sixty-two he'd done the same for his legs. It wasn't a hard thing to fake, and it gave him some credibility when he stopped at _Sixty-Seven Mississippi_. Xander dropped his arms, literally dropped them, figuring it would enhance the image, and abruptly sat down on the floor.

Agent Dunne came over and knelt next to Xander. "Are you okay? Want some water or something?" She handed Xander a bottle and he drank some from it, then dumped the rest of it over his head, as if he'd been sweating. He was hoping that Dunne hadn't noticed his distinct lack of perspiration.

"Okay, very cool. Successful test." Vosbury was writing something down on one of those tricorder computer pads everyone in SHIELD seemed to be using. "For the record, um, Power Girl, you can apparently list nearly seven tons over your head." He tapped on the machine's keyboard and a list popped up. "So, out of all the people we tested with this machine, you're right in between... hmmm... Beast and Spider-Man. Not too shabby."

Xander took another drink from the bottle, then looked over to Agent Dunne. "So what other tests are on the schedule for today?"

**XxxxxxX**

The rest of the tests were of a similar nature, and Xander floated through all of them. The easiest to fake were the sensory tests. The hardest was the treadmill. They put Xander on a treadmill with some breathing apparatus in his mouth, measuring his air intake. And then they slowly increased speed on the treadmill. Xander kept up with it until he got tired of the whole exercise and stopped running, but the nature of the test made it hard to pretend that he wasn't capable of not just running at over 40 miles an hour, but could keep it up nearly indefinitely.

They figured out the indefinitely part from his breathing patterns apparently. It was at this point that Xander really began to consider panicking. Just flat out panicking.

The tests took just under two weeks to complete. And for four days after that, nothing much happened. Xander returned to his state of perpetual boredom, watching children's cartoons on the television, and watching a city (he presumed it was New York; he thought he recognized one of the sky scrapers) go by outside his window.

Given a choice, Xander actually preferred the tests.

**XxxxxxX**

Three weeks crawled when your life was this heavily regimented. Agent Dunne had negotiated with her boss on his behalf, and as a result, Xander had been allowed to go to the gym the agents used once a week. The weights hadn't interested him, or the treadmills, but the place also had four racquetball courts. Sure, he was forced to play by himself, and he was under constant surveillance by a pair of snipers, but even with being completely self-taught, he was actually getting pretty good at racquetball

He was also becoming a dab hand at solitaire.

Xander was, in fact, in the middle of a game of Clocks when he was notified that someone was coming into his cell. He put his cards down and assumed the position, and shortly thereafter Agent Dunne and four of her people came in.

"Good morning, Agent Dunne! Surprised to see you here. You usually don't come by on Tuesdays."

The Agent didn't respond, and she wasn't smiling. In point of fact, she looked vaguely pissed off. And she was holding a set of shackles. Xander reviewed everything that had happened over the past couple of days and couldn't think of anything that would have got him into trouble.

"Is everything all right?"

Dunne took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. "No, everything isn't all right. You're being transferred, and we need to take you down to processing. Stand up, please."

Xander stood, wondering what was going on. He didn't resist when his hands were shackled; he was used to being shackled up when he left the cell. But after his wrists were bound, Dunne motioned to one of the other agents, who started working on Xander's ankles.

"Hey, wait... I haven't had to... you haven't put me in ankle chains for weeks. What's going on?" During his stay with SHIELD, Xander hadn't been a complete line-toer necessarily, but he hadn't been the blatant rebel against all authority that Buffy had been. His first reaction was to go along to get along, and cooperate with people until cooperation turned out to be useless. And when that happened, his instinct was to get out from under the authority as quickly as possible.

So, as he felt his ankles being bound, there was a voice in the back of his head reminding him that, if he wanted, he could leave at any time and there was almost nothing these nice young SHIELD agents could do about it. For all that he hated the fact that he was living in a female body, the female body was Kryptonian, for crying out loud. So why was he putting up with this? He tamped down on those thoughts. He was worried, but not yet to the point that he was going to risk bringing SHIELD down on his head with an escape.

If he was going to be stuck in the Marvel Universe for a while, and he had been operating on the assumption that he was going to be stuck here for a while, he was pretty sure he didn't want to live as an escaped fugitive. Especially a super-powered escaped fugitive. Not in a universe where Iron Man and Captain America tended to beat on escaped fugitives. Not to mention the government. The government in this universe, if he remembered collectively, had their own pretty heavy resources when it came to hunting down fugitives. Of course, nothing he could think of could possibly handle a Kryptonian who didn't want to be handled, but it was always possible he was forgetting something. And besides, he didn't want to live constantly looking over his shoulder. Hence the cooperation.

"Am I going to, like, see a judge now? Couple of weeks ago you said that my case was being reviewed and I'd have to see a judge..." He'd mostly slept through civics, but his long history as a watcher of pretty much all television had taught him certain things about due process. And she had told him his case was being reviewed.

Dunne finally met his eyes. "Something like that. Let's go."

Xander heard he heartbeat speed up. The temperature of her face increased by four degrees. And she was holding her eyes directly on Xander's by force of will. She was lying about something.

Dunne took him by the arm and led him out of the cell. Two of the agents walked in front of them, and two behind, and Xander could see at least four other agents lingering around in sight. None of them were acting like they did when they took him down to play racquetball. During those transfers, they were careful, but at least they projected good will, as if they recognized that Xander wasn't a problem prisoner and thus they could afford to be at least a little nice to him. These were the same agents, but all the courtesy and good will he'd earned by cooperating had been thrown out the window.

The group shuffled toward the elevator as best they could, given Xander's limited range of movement.

**XxxxxxX**

Xander was led into a bare, badly lit room that someone had decided to paint a sickly green. The walls and the ceiling were all the same shade of green. It gave the room a dark cast, and made it seem like the lights in the ceiling were bad, or perhaps out of focus somehow. The only furniture in the room was a wide metal table surrounded by chairs. The chairs were just chairs, but the table was interesting. Xander's x-ray vision couldn't penetrate it, and he could see that the legs of the table extended into the floor a good ways.

There were four men and a woman already in the room. They stood as Xander entered.

Two more of those one-way-glass windows took up the walls to the right and left. It took Xander less than a second to count the people who were moving around behind them. Whatever was going on, it was being witnessed by twelve hidden people and four cameras. He thought he recognized two of the people behind the windows as the men who Dunne answered to. Another was one of the doctors who'd come in to check on his health while he was in the cell. And one of them was Leonard Samson.

_Interesting._

The only other feature of note was a door on the far side of the room, behind the table.

Xander took all of this in quickly. He was being pushed forward toward one of the chairs at one end.

Agent Dunne gestured toward one particular chair. "Sit down, please. Place your hands flat on the table." Xander followed her directions, and only then noticed that the table, where he was sitting, had a divot-shaped depression in its surface. His wrist-restraints were clipped to a short chain connected to a ring hidden in the divot, and Xander realized he was now chained to the table. He couldn't raise his hands more than two or three inches above its surface. With Xander in place, the others all took their places. One of the men sat behind what looked like a shrunken typewriter; the others shuffled papers around from various files.

The man on the far side of the table turned to Typewriter Boy and said, "On the record." He cleared his voice and then spoke as if he was reading off the nightly news. "Disposition hearing for Federal Prisoner 011894-O6L, one Karen Linda Starr. The time is..." the man stopped talking long enough to check his watch. "The time is 4:12 pm, and its 11 August 2006. Judge James K. Nightlinger presiding. Prosecutor is Daniel Posthelwhite. Emma James is the appointed representative of the defendant."

"Um... wait... I have a lawyer? I haven't talked to any..."

"Young lady, be quiet unless you're being asked a direct question." The man, who Xander presumed was Judge Nightlinger, didn't even look up from the file as he spoke. "I advise you to keep your mouth shut and let your attorney do the talking." Without looking up the judge nodded toward the person sitting next to Xander. Presumably, this was Emma James, attorney-at law. Xander had never met her before in his life, and the fact that this Emma person was now looking at Xander like she'd just discovered a roach in her corn flakes did not fill Xander with good feelings at all.

"You've both read the evaluation results?" The judge continued, glancing over his glasses at two of the people sitting across from him. Xander's attorney and one of the other men, both nodded. "Recommendations?"

"Its pretty clear that Ms. Starr is delusional. Doctor Samson's diagnosis was schizophrenia Given her power level, she's a danger to those around her. We want her remanded."

"Hey!" Xander interjected. His lawyer put a hand on his arm and gave him a warning glance that was seconded by the judge. He wasn't sure what remanded meant, but it sounded suspiciously like 'put in jail.'

"Your Honor, Doctor Samson also said that she's a functional schizophrenic and thus not likely a danger to anyone. He even cited several contributing members of society who..."

"None of whom can lift a pick up truck over their heads." The man interrupted.

"He's got a point, Emma. How do we know that this young lady won't snap and start beating people to death with her bare hands?" The judge sat back and sighed. "I'm leaning toward granting the prosecution's request."

"Hold on! Wait! You're supposed to be letting me go!" Everyone at the table turned to look at Xander. "That was the deal! I cooperated, went through some tests, was a good boy, registered with the government, and you'd let me go."

Xander's attorney started to say something, but Xander ignored her. "That was the deal, Judge."

The judge's expression didn't change. "Miss Starr, I don't know who told you what, but there wasn't any deal. There never was any deal. Your final disposition is in my hands, and for all that you are acting in a reasonable manner now, you have been found to be mentally incompetent by a qualified expert. Combine that with your physical abilities, I find that you are a potential danger to yourself and to others, and thus am remanding you to the care of an appropriate facility where you will be treated."

The man took a deep breath and let it out in a long weary sigh. "If, at some time in the future you become mentally sound, your disposition will be reconsidered."

Xander was shaking his head. "That's not fair. That's not fair at all. I did everything I was asked, and was promised I'd be let go. You people... you people are going back on your word."

"Miss Starr..." the judge began.

"Harris! My name is Harris!" Xander was almost yelling at this point.

"And that's what I am talking about, Miss Starr. You think you're a character in a television show. I can't let you out where you can hurt other people. I'm sorry." With that, the judge stood, turned, and left the room through the door on the other side of the table.

The other people were all standing up, too. "Okay, so we'll finish the paperwork this afternoon, and she can be shipped tomorrow morning, I suppose." The 'prosecutor', whose name Xander never caught, was talking about shipping him off as if he was a basket of fruit or something. "Sound good to you?"

"Fine." His attorney responded. "I'll have..."

"No! Not fine!" Xander yelled. "I've played it straight with all of you people, and now you're shoving me into a psycho ward and going back on your word! I've been sitting on my butt bored to tears because I knew I'd be walking out of here eventually! You can't keep me here! I've got rights!"

Everyone stared at him like he just grew a second head. Agent Dunne approached, obviously trying to calm him down. "Okay, Xander, just take a deep breath. Its not as bad as you think."

"Yeah? Why should I believe you? You're one of the liars!" Xander stood up as best he could with his hands still chained to the table. Time to do something about that. There were tears in Xander's eyes. He hated being played for a sucker. Maybe this was why she never liked Marvel Comics. The whole universe was filled with pricks and assholes. Even the heroes were a bunch of arrogant shits. "My name really is Alexandra Lavelle Harris. I really was born in Sunnydale, California. And yeah, I really am stuck in a girl's body."

"Xander, if you don't sit back down, we'll..." Agent Dunne began, once again trying to get control over the situation. Her hand was on her pistol.

"No! No more directions. I'm not taking any more instructions from you, Agent Dunne. Dunne... heh... yeah, we're done all right." And with that, Xander straightened his back and **_PULLED_**.

**XxxxxxX**

"Holy shit! Are you seeing this, boss?" Bart Copella could not believe what he was watching. The girl had simply stood up and yanked, causing the adamantium-osmium alloy cable attaching the shackles around her wrists to the table to first bend and stretch like it was taffy and then finally snap. "How in the fuck is she doing that! We tested her! That would take, like, Hulk-level strength!"

"Yeah, well, apparently she cheated on the test." He picked up the black phone and tapped zero. As soon as he heard a click, he spoke. "This is Understone. Lock down the facility. I need security in Interrogation Four now!" Without waiting for an answer, he disconnected, then his the number for the other observation room. "Yeah, tell Samson to get his ass in there and subdue that prisoner."

**XxxxxxX**

"Xander stop!" Agent Dunne had drawn her weapon. Xander didn't even blink. He pulled his arms apart and the chains holding the shackles stretched and snapped.

"Agent Dunne, its been a pleasure. You seem like a nice person and under different circumstances we could have been buds. But I'm not listening to you anymore." He bent over and pulled his ankle chains apart. When he straightened up, he turned toward her, just in time for her to pull the trigger.

The pistol used by Agent Dunne was not a standard firearm, and did not rely on gunpowder or a chemical reaction to propel its ammunition. Rather, it used a highly engineered magnetic accelerator to push its adamantium-tipped bullet to nearly twice the speed of sound. When fired the bullet was capable of penetrating a rather prodigious amount of concrete, and had proven capable of at least stunning some of the most indestructible of earth's superhuman criminals.

There was a loud **CHOCK** as the hyper-bullet left the pistol's muzzle. It hit Xander, who was still straightening up, at an angle and ricocheted straight up and through the ceiling. The sound of the ricochet was even louder than the sound of the weapon being fired.

Xander felt like Buffy had just given him one of her patented just-strong-enough-to-hurt 'you're being a goof' punches. If that was as hard as the bullets from the SHIELD agents' guns hit, he could take it as long as he needed to. Agent Dunne pulled the trigger twice more, and the hyper-bullets ricocheted away in random directions. One smashed through the one-way glass of the observation room to the left.

"Jesus, lady! Stop! You'll hurt somebody!" Xander yelled. "I mean... someone else!" He snatched the pistol out of her hands and crumbled it to scrap in his hand. He casually tossed the remains of her weapon aside and went to work on the nullifier collar, which obviously hadn't been nullifying anything at all. As he did, the civilians in the room scrambled for the doors as quickly as they could, while the SHIELD agents moved in.

Agent Dunne, deprived of her firearm, whipped out a telescoping rod, took a half step, and brought the weapon down across the back of Xander's legs. Xander didn't even feel it. He finished prying off the collar and tossed it aside casually. Dunne brought the rod across Xander's face to the same lack of effect, causing Xander to just roll his eyes at her. "You're more likely to hurt yourself than you're ever going to hurt me, Agent Dunne. What's next? You gonna use some kung fu on me? You'll break your hand. Or your foot. Or something."

Agent Dunne stopped and stood there, unsure how to proceed. "What are you going to do? Please, don't hurt anyone." She looked around at the other agents, who were standing there, looking confused and ineffectual. They'd seen Dunne's attempts to subdue the prisoner, and just how little effect they'd had. None of them were looking to get injured.

"What am I going to do? I'm leaving." Xander looked around, then pointed toward the door. He'd taken three steps toward it when suddenly the doorway was filled.

Doc Samson had arrived. Xander pulled up short as the man entered the room. "Doc, I'm leaving now. Don't do anything stupid, because I don't want to hurt anyone." He held his hands up, trying to get the man to stand down.

Samson wasn't having any of it. "You're not going anywhere." He leapt forward and grabbed Xander around the wrist, then pulled, obviously trying to make her off-balance. Xander didn't move an inch. With his free hand, he calmly reached up and began applying pressure to Samson's thumb, trying to break the man's grip without breaking the man's bones. Samson growled, literally growled, and swung his other fist around. The punch caught Xander across the jaw. Xander blinked, then continued prying Samson's fingers off of his arm. Samson punched him twice more but stopped as Xander twisted Samson's wrist around. Xander grabbed onto the man's belt and lifted him bodily off the ground before tossing him through the shattered observation room window and into the far wall on the other side. Samson's body made a visible indentation in the concrete before he fell to the floor.

He had just turned back to the door when a pair of gas grenades landed right at his feet. Swiftly, a grayish-white smoke filled the room. The agents, who'd still been standing there useless during Xander's tussle with Doc Samson dropped to the floor, crying and snotting up, and in at least one case losing total control over their bladder. Xander gently picked up the grenades, which were still spewing smoke, and carefully examined them for a moment. Then he pinched the release valves closed.

Xander stepped out into the hallway where he was met by eight new agents. The barbed projectiles from two different tasers bounced off his skin as the extendable baton of a third agent rebounded against the back of his head so hard the agent wielding it had to drop it.

As with the agents in the interrogation room, the reinforcements just stood there confused as soon as they realized that there was nothing they could do to stop Xander from escaping. Xander looked the hall up and down, then scanned through the walls into the rooms around him. Stepping to the wall on the east side of the corridor, he punched through it as easily as he might pop a soap bubble, stepping through into the next room. The walls, it turned out, looked like concrete but turned out to be cinderblock and drywall. Not that it mattered.

"Okay, I'm officially a fugitive who has escaped custody from a gigantic multi-national crime-fighting organization. What am I going to do next?" The thought_ I'm going to Disney World!_ immediately popped into his head and he giggled. The sound of it stopped him for a moment. He hadn't laughed with serious humor since he woke up, and this is how he sounded? It wasn't even a real laugh, it was a giggle!

There was a loud series of pops behind him as an agent who hadn't got the memo tried to shoot him with a standard pistol. "Would you assholes stop shooting me!? You're just going to hurt yourself!" He broke a hole through the next wall. He found himself in some sort of conference room with windows. He stopped to take in the view, nothing that the building he was in overlooked the water. In the distance he could see the Statue of Liberty. He couldn't tell how high he was.

Xander punched the window, shattering it. He was about to step through when he heard Agent Dunne's voice behind him. It was raspy and course, obviously still affected by the tear gas she'd inhaled earlier. "Xander, stop! Please. Stop!" It caused Xander to pause. Even if she'd lied to him, Dunne had always been nice and polite and at least tried to treat him with courtesy. Xander turned around with an expectant look on his face.

"Yes?"

Dunne started talking, fast. "There's nowhere to run, Xander. We're forty stories up. I don't think you can survive that kind of fall. The Avengers are going to be here any minute now. Stop. Just stop. Surrender, and I promise there won't be any repercussions for your escape attempt."

"Like you promised me I'd be let go if I cooperated?"

Dunne swallowed guiltily. "I'm sorry about that. When I heard who was hearing your case, I... I'm sorry. But you need to stop. The Avengers will beat you down, and Stark will figure out a way to contain you and you'll still end up in treatment. You need help. You're not well, Xander. You need help."

"No, I don't. The only help I need is help getting home."

"Its okay, Xander, I get it! You're a scared kid who's in over her head. The shock of everything, getting your powers, what was going on with your home life... I get it. I didn't have the best childhood either, Xander. I know how it can be, coming from an abusive home. Please, just don't make it worse for yourself."

Xander took a deep breath and shook his head. "I don't want to fight anyone, and I don't want to be chased. But I'm not crazy. I am who I say I am. And the truth is, when it comes down to it, I can run pretty fast and I'm really good at hiding."

With that, Xander hopped up onto the widow ledge and stepped into the air. He hovered there, just outside the shattered window, and gave Agent Dunne a friendly wave. "Take care of yourself, Agent Dunne. I'd hate for something to happen to you. You tried to be nice to me, and I won't forget that."

And with that, Xander Harris flew away.

**XxxxxxX**

**Author's Note:** Anything you recognize belongs to either Marvel Comics or Mutant Enemy. Everything else is mine.


End file.
